But I refrain in charity from such pedantic considerations. Here is real need, though, to point out that before printing became pandemic the only way in which anybody's writing won a chance of survival was by some other person's finding its matter sufficiently congenial to be at pains to make a copy of it. In nature, that which most rapturously recorded the inane struck home to most bosoms, upon the chronic principle that still procures admirers for the philosophy of Dr. Frank Crane,[12] and for the novels of Floyd and Ethel Dell:[13] so, from the first, have long odds favored earnest mediocrity.... To the vitality of the mediocre I shall return. Meanwhile that dangerous invention of Gutenberg's has changed all; and has ensured a fair chance of perpetuity for that which is excellent, provided always this excellence be not swept away unnoted and hidden by the spume and froth of the torrential river it floats in, that ever-passing deluge of the current books. Sometimes befalls a favoring miracle of salvage, and such dissimilar lost argosies as those of Samuel Butler and Herman Melville return upstream with flying colors. But who may say how deep, how irretrievably, their betters may not lie sunken? or can gravely assert that literary permanence is in any very general demand among the buyers or publishers or writers of new books?... Indeed, I know of no class of men which quite whole-heartedly desires the production and formal recognizing of any more "classics": since even those who care for fine literature cannot but obscurely feel that there is already a deal more of it existent than any human being can hope to assimilate; and that already the literary pantheon of the self-respecting is thronged with gods whose virtues we are compelled, in this limited lifetime, to accept as an article of faith. There is, for example, Defoe or Richardson--or, of more recent hierarchs, Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. Joseph Conrad,--before the shrine of each of whom many are zealous to pass with every form of respect which does not entail stopping. And I suspect, if the persons who cry up _Don Quixote_ were afforded a choice between silence and reading every line of this world-famous "classic," there would no longer be any need to think an instant before you pronounce its name. § 90