Standing still too long is rather monotonous work. How Socrates could have managed to remain a whole night on his feet in meditation is one of those strange historical circumstances that have always puzzled me. Now here have I been only a few minutes at rest; only dreaming one little "dream" of how I, together with the Kaiser and the _Pall Mall_, am going to set to work in the general renovation and improvement of mankind, and yet I am as tired and bored and disposed to yawn as any of the gaping people in the crowd who have stopped a second to listen to me. Let me pass on, good folk!--I will e'en resume my indolent, aimless way, for truly there are many things to be seen both wise and wonderful, which even a strolling player would not miss. Only I will, with everybody's good leave, avoid that black and stagnant quagmire of literary matter that stretches its unseemly length across the social arena. 'Tis a veritable mud-trap, a dismal Slough of Despond, into which I once fell heedlessly, all through the force of example. I saw others (some of whom I respected) making for the Slough, and I followed. When my friends ran to it straight and tumbled in, I did likewise, and wallowed in the mud with those who were near and dear to me. I stayed there heroically till I was nearly suffocated, then, unable to bear it any longer, I made a strong effort and scrambled out, melancholy and depressed, but--free. Free, and wise enough not to be cajoled into those black depths again. You see I have not yet shaken off my allegorical humour, and I am just now speaking allegorically. For the benefit of those who are slow to perceive the "subtle" meaning of an allegory I do not mind condescending to explain that by the Slough of Despond I mean the great, sticky, woful, heterogeneous mass of Magazine Literature. What is the use of it? Why is it with us? Who wants such productions as the magazines of England, when the magazines of America can be had? Americans know how to make their magazines interesting; Englishmen do not. I beg some one who is well instructed in these matters to tell me where I can find the abnormal beings who derive any real intellectual benefit from the ponderous pages of the _Nineteenth Century_, for example? Little Knowles sits in his editorial chair even as an angler sits by a stream, assiduously fishing for names and nothing more. He allows Gladstone to write the purest nonsense about "Dante at Oxford," simply because he _is_ Gladstone. He takes poorly-written articles on public questions from lords and dukes simply because they _are_ lords and dukes. Genius weighs as nothing with him--titles and passing notorieties that "draw" are everything. Then we have the _Contemporary_, the _Fortnightly_, the _New Review_, the _Quarterly_, all on the same "deadly lively" level. The _Quarterly_ still boasts of its bygone villainous attack on Keats, for not so very long ago it said that it considered that in-"famous" criticism perfectly justifiable.