_Common-place_ advisers and men of the world, are always pestering you to conform to their maxims and modes, just like the _barkers_ in Monmouth-street, who stop the passengers by entreating them to turn in and _refit_ at their second-hand repositories. VIII The word _gentility_ is constantly in the mouths of vulgar people; as quacks and pretenders are always talking of _genius_. Those who possess any real excellence think and say the least about it. IX Taste is often envy in disguise: it turns into the art of reducing excellence within the smallest possible compass, or of finding out the _minimum_ of pleasure. Some people admire only what is new and fashionable—the work of the day, of some popular author—the last and frothiest bubble that glitters on the surface of fashion. All the rest is gone by, ‘in the deep bosom of the ocean buried;’ to allude to it is Gothic, to insist upon it odious. We have only to wait a week to be relieved of the hot-pressed page, of the vignette-title; and in the interim can look with sovereign contempt on the wide range of science, learning, art, and on those musty old writers who lived before the present age of novels. Peace be with their _manes_! There are others, on the contrary, to whom all the modern publications are anathema, a by-word—they get rid of this idle literature ‘at one fell swoop’—disqualify the present race from all pretensions whatever, get into a corner with an obscure writer, and devour the cobwebs and the page together, and pick out in the quaintest production, the quaintest passages, the merest _choke-pear_, which they think nobody can swallow but themselves. X