though not improvidently. Wherever she bestows a _turn_ for any thing on the individual, she implants a corresponding taste for it in others. We have only to ‘throw our bread upon the waters, and after many days we shall find it again.’ Let us do our best, and we need not be ashamed of the smallness of our talent, or afraid of the calumnies and contempt of envious maligners. When Goldsmith was talking one day to Sir Joshua of writing a fable in which little fishes were to be introduced, Dr. Johnson rolled about uneasily in his seat and began to laugh, on which Goldsmith said rather angrily—‘Why do you laugh? If you were to write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales!’ The reproof was just. Johnson was in truth conscious of Goldsmith’s superior inventiveness, and of the lighter graces of his pen, but he wished to reduce every thing to his own pompous and oracular style. There are not only _books for children_, but books for all ages and for both sexes. After we grow up to years of discretion, we do not all become equally wise at once. Our own tastes change: the tastes of other individuals are still more different. It was said the other day, that ‘Thomson’s Seasons would be read while there was a boarding-school girl in the world.’ If a thousand volumes were written against _Hervey’s Meditations_, the Meditations would be read when the criticisms were forgotten. To the illiterate and vain, affectation and verbiage will always pass for fine writing, while the world stands. No woman ever liked Burke, or disliked Goldsmith. It is idle to set up an universal standard. There is a large class who, in spite of themselves, prefer Westall or Angelica Kauffman to Raphael; nor is it fit they should do otherwise. We may come to something like a fixed and exclusive standard of taste, if we confine ourselves to what will please the best judges, meaning thereby persons of the most refined and cultivated minds, and by persons of the most refined and cultivated minds, generally meaning _ourselves_![19]