Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first
should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the
second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the
epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who
distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnés_ of other men's
grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new
book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the
critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland,
and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who
apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the
literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and
embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual
_from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.
These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary
periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly,
however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1)
advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real
criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to
admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables
root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth
themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private
letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and
wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces,
itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of
insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers
there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese
inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk
whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary
day?