In truth, review-writing but exemplifies the casual character of modern literature. Everything about it is temporary and fragmentary. Look at a railway stall; you see books of every colour—blue, yellow, crimson, ‘ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted,’ on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent—but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey. The volumes at least, you can see clearly, are not intended to be everlasting. It may be all very well for a pure essence like poetry to be immortal in a perishable world; it has no feeling; but paper cannot endure it, paste cannot bear it, string has no heart for it. The race has made up its mind to be fugitive, as well as minute. What a change from the ancient volume!— ‘That weight of wood, with leathern coat o’erlaid, Those ample clasps, of solid metal made; The close-press’d leaves, unoped for many an age, The dull red edging of the well-fill’d page; On the broad back the stubborn ridges roll’d, Where yet the title stands in tarnish’d gold.’ And the change in the appearance of books has been accompanied—has been caused—by a similar change in readers. What a transition from the student of former ages!—from a grave man, with grave cheeks and a considerate eye, who spends his life in study, has no interest in the outward world, hears nothing of its din, and cares nothing for its honours, who would gladly learn and gladly teach, whose whole soul is taken up with a few books of ‘Aristotle and his Philosophy,’—to the merchant in the railway, with a head full of sums, an idea that tallow is ‘up,’ a conviction that teas are ‘lively,’ and a mind reverting perpetually from the little volume which he reads to these mundane topics, to the railway, to the shares, to the buying and bargaining universe. We must not wonder that the outside of books is so different, when the inner nature of those for whom they are written is so changed.