Works had to be transcribed by hand, which was a slow and laboriousoperation; they were written either on parchment, which was expensive,so that one work was often erased to make way for another; or onpapyrus, which was fragile and extremely perishable. Authorship was alimited and unprofitable craft, pursued chiefly by monks in theleisure and solitude of their cloisters. The accumulation ofmanuscripts was slow and costly, and confined almost entirely tomonasteries. To these circumstances it may, in some measure, beowing that we have not been inundated by the intellect of antiquity;that the fountains of thought have not been broken up, and moderngenius drowned in the deluge. But the inventions of paper and thepress have put an end to all these restraints. They have made everyone a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print, anddiffuse itself over the whole intellectual world. The consequences arealarming. The stream of literature has swollen into a torrent-augmented into a river- expanded into a sea. A few centuries since,five or six hundred manuscripts constituted a great library; butwhat would you say to libraries such as actually exist, containingthree or four hundred thousand volumes; legions of authors at the sametime busy; and the press going on with fearfully increasingactivity, to double and quadruple the number? Unless some unforseenmortality should break out among the progeny of the muse, now that shehas become so prolific, I tremble for posterity. I fear the merefluctuation of language will not be sufficient. Criticism may do much.
It increases with the increase of literature, and resembles one ofthose salutary checks on population spoken of by economists. Allpossible encouragement, therefore, should be given to the growth ofcritics, good or bad. But I fear all will be in vain; let criticism dowhat it may, writers will write, printers will print, and the worldwill inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon be theemployment of a lifetime merely to learn their names. Many a man ofpassable information, at the present day, reads scarcely any thing butreviews; and before long a man of erudition will be little better thana mere walking catalogue.
