It is on record, that works admirably adapted to find readers and to make them, had but an extremely confined and slowly widening circulation, according to _our_ standard of the popular success of the productions of distinguished talents. Nor did the writers _reckon_ on any such popular success. In the calculations of their literary ambition, it was a thing of course that the people went for nothing. It is apparent in allusions to the people occurring in these very works, that "the lower sort," "the vulgar herd," "the canaille," "the mob," "the many-headed beast," "the million," (and even these designations generally meant something short of the lowest classes of all,) were no more thought of in any relation to a state of cultivated intelligence than Turks or Tartars. The readers are habitually recognized as a kind of select community, conversed with on topics and in a language with which the vulgar have nothing at all to do,--a converse the more gratifying on that account. And any casual allusions to the bulk of the people are expressed in phrases unaffectedly implying, that they are a herd of beings existing on quite other terms and for essentially other ends, than we, fine writers, and you, our admiring readers. It is evident in our literature of that age, (a feature still more prominent in that of France, at the same and down to a much later period,) that the main national population, accounted as creatures to which souls and senses were given just to render their limbs mechanically serviceable, were regarded by the intellectual aristocracy with hardly so active a sentiment as contempt; they were not worth that; it was the easy indifference toward what was seldom thought of as in existence.