An aspect of mind combining both resolution and diffidence, which has lead to the obliteration of literary work, is reliance on a friend’s counsel. An amusing example of this is related in the ecclesiastical history of Nicephorus Callistus concerning Marsilius Ficinus. This gentleman had translated Plato into Latin, and came to his learned friend Musurus Candiotus to know his opinion of it. Candiotus, after perusing some few leaves, perceived that it would not satisfy the expectation of the learned, and was even of opinion that it was so slubbered over as to resemble the original (as Cicero the younger did his father) in nothing but in name. He accordingly took up a sponge, dipped it in an ink-pot, and blotted out the first page. This done, he turns to Ficinus. “Thou seest,” quoth he “how I have corrected the first page; if thou wilt, I will correct the rest in like sort.” Now Ficinus was fully as mild in temper as slender in scholarship. “No reason,” says he, “that Plato should be disgraced through my default; refine away.” And according to his words was it done. It would appear from Scaliger that even had not Ficinus commenced his out-sponged work afresh, literature would not have lamentably lost. Far, indeed, would this have been from true, had the influence of a friend prevailed to wipe from among the works of Gray “The Progress of Poetry,” and “The Bard.” I will not deny of its setting the sentence in which Walpole communicates the likelihood of such a fate. One quality I may safely arrogate to myself: I am not _afraid to praise_. Many are such timid judges of composition, that they hesitate to wait for the public opinion. Show them a manuscript, though they highly approve it in their hearts, they are afraid to commit themselves by speaking out. Several excellent works have perished from this cause; a writer of real talents being often a mere sensitive plant with regard to his own productions. Some cavils of Mason (how inferior a poet and judge!) had almost induced Gray to destroy his two beautiful and sublime odes. We should not only praise, but hasten to praise. In modern days the function of Mason is more generally filled by adverse public critics. The case of the late Edward Fitzgerald, who by an unfavorable review was induced to withdraw from circulation his “Six Dramas of Calderon,” and probably altogether to withhold from the public his rendering of “La Vida es Sueño,” and “El Mágico Prodigioso,” is until the present unhappily in point. More melancholy still are those episodes of literary history which present the wearied author consigning with forced smile and show of acquiescence—“coactus volo”—the products of his craft to an untimely end. English history does not lack its instances of these heroic souls in motley, these Herculeses with their distaffs. There is John Selden, and there is Reginald Pecock: let us bare the mishaps of these representatives.