THE MONSTER-MISERY OF LITERATURE. BY A MOUSE BORN OF THE MOUNTAIN. Be under no apprehension, gentle public, that you are about to be kept in suspense touching the moral of our argumentation, as too often in the pamphlets addressed in Johnsonian English to Thompsonian understandings, wherein a pennyworth of matter is set forth by a monstrous quantity of phrase. We mean to speak to the point; we mean to enlighten your understanding as by the smiting of a lucifer-match. Refrain, therefore, from running your eye impatiently along the page, as you are doing at this moment, in hopes of discovering, italicized, the secret of the enigma; for we have no intention of keeping you another moment ignorant that the monster-misery of literature is--guess! Which of you hath hit it? The monster-misery of literature is--THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY! In this devout conviction, devote we to the infernal gods the memory of the Athenian republic--the first keeper of a circulating library. Every tyro is aware that this Sams or Ebers of antiquity lent out to Ptolemy of Egypt, for a first-rate subscription of fifteen talents, the works of Euripides, Eschylus, and Sophocles; thereby affording a precedent for the abominable practice, fatal to bookmakers and booksellers, which has converted the waters of Castalia into their present disgraceful puddle! Every scribbler of the day who has a Perryian pen in hand, is pleased to exercise it on the decline of the drama; one of the legitimate targets of penny-a-liners. But how inadequately are the goose quills, and ostrich quills, phoenix quills, and roc quills, of the few standard critics of the age, directed towards the monstrous abuse of public patience which will render the Victorian age the sad antithesis of the Elizabethan, in the literary history of the land! Content so long as they can get a new work, _tale quale_, as a peg whereon to hang the rusty garments of their erudition, not a straw care they for the miserable decline and fall of the great empire of letters; an empire overrun by what Goths--what Huns--what Vandals!--by the iniquitous and barbarous hosts of circulating libraries!