“I am not sure,” says Sir Egerton Brydges, “that the life of an author is an happy life; but yet if the seeds of authorship be in him, he will not be happy except in the indulgence of this occupation. Without the culture and free air which these seeds require, they will wither and turn to poison.” It is no desirable thing, according to this representation, to be born with such a predisposition to the most dangerous of all callings. But still more pitiable is the condition of such a person if Mr. Fosbrooke has described it truly: “the mind of a man of genius,” says he, (who beyond all question is a man of genius himself) “is always in a state of pregnancy, or parturition; and its power of bearing offspring is bounded only by supervening disease, or by death.” Those who are a degree lower in genius are in a yet worse predicament; such a sort of man, as Norris of Bemerton describes, who “although he conceives often, yet by some chance or other, he always miscarries, and the issue proves abortive.” JUNO LUCINA _fer opem!_ This invocation the Doctor never made metaphorically for himself, whatever serious and secret prayers he may have preferred for others, when exercising one branch of his tripartite profession. Bernardin de Saint Pierre says in one of his letters, when his _Etudes de la Nature_ were in the press, _Je suis a present dans les douleurs de l'enfantement, car il n'y a point de mère qui souffre autant en mettant un enfant au monde, et qui craigne plus qu'on ne l'ecorche ou qu'on ne les crève un œil, qu'un auteur qui revoit les épreuves de son ouvrage._ CHAPTER CCXXV. TWO QUESTIONS GROWING OUT OF THE PRECEDING CHAPTER. A Taylor who has no objection to wear motley, may make himself a great coat with half a yard of his own stuff, by eking it out with cabbage from every piece that comes in his way. ROBERT SOUTHEY. But here two questions arise: Ought Dr. Dove, or ought he not, to have been an author? Was he, or was he not, the happier, for not being one? “Not to leave the reader,” as Lightfoot says, “in a _bivium_ of irresolutions,” I will examine each of these questions, _escriviendo algunos breves reglones, sobre lo mucho que dezir y escrivir se podria en esto;—moviendo me principalmente a ello la grande ignorancia que sobre esta matheria veo manifiestamente entre las gentes de nuestro siglo._[1] [Footnote 1: GARIBAY.] “I am and have been,” says Robert Wilmot, “(if there be in me any soundness of judgment) of this opinion, that whatsoever is committed to the press is commended to eternity; and it shall stand a lively witness with our conscience, to our comfort or confusion, in the reckoning of that great day. Advisedly therefore was that proverb used of our elder Philosopher, _Manum a Tabulâ_; withhold thy hand from the paper, and thy papers from the print, or light of the world.”