very earliest attempt to impress a mark of ownership upon some bucket of the Argonauts, or the rudest scrawl of Polyphemus in forging a tarry brand upon some sheep which he had stolen, could be _so_ bad, _so_ staggering and illegible, as are these literary inscriptions. How much better to have had a thin tablet or veneering of marble or iron adjusted to the back of the book. A stone-cutter in a rural churchyard once told me that he charged a penny _per_ letter. That may be cheap for a gravestone, but it seems rather high for a book. _Plato_ would cost you fivepence, _Aristotle_ would be shocking; and in decency you must put him into Latin, which would add twopence more to every volume. On a library like that of Dresden or the Vatican, it would raise a national debt to letter the books. _Cause of the Novel's Decline._--No man, it may be safely laid down as a general rule, can obtain a strong hold over the popular mind without more or less of real power. A reality there must be. The artifice, the trickery, cannot arise in this first stage, as by any substitution of a shadow for a reality. If the mass of readers _feel_ a power, and acknowledge a power, in that case power there must be. It was the just remark of Dr. Johnson that men do not deceive themselves in their amusements. And amusement it is that the great public seek in literature. The meaner and the more sensual the demands of a man are, so much the less possible it becomes to cheat him. Seeking for warmth, he cannot be wrong when he says that he has found it. Asking for _alcohol_, he will never be cheated with water. His feelings in such a case, his impressions, instantaneously justify themselves; that is, they bear witness past all doubting to the certainty of what they report. So far there is no opening to mistake. The error, the opening to the spurious on the largest scale, arises first upon the _quality_ of the power. Strength varies upon an endless scale, not merely by its own gradations, but by the modes and the degrees in which it combines with other qualities. And there are many combinations, cases of constant recurrence, in which some natural vigour, but of no remarkable order, enters into alliance with animal propensities; where a portentous success will indicate no corresponding power in the artist, but only an unusual insensibility to decency and the opinion of thoughtful persons.