Note 2 — LETTER XXI.

This letter is not, however, sent to invite you to sympathise with me on account of the sooty residence I endure, for it is not so unpleasant a place to a man with a healthy mind, as gentle-folks with exaggerated sensibilities are apt to consider it. We do see the sky, and sometimes the green fields, and those who always live among the latter don’t seem to be more refined, more elevated, or more use in the world than we are. But it is written very respectfully to remonstrate with you on account of your peculiar method of publication. You write books and letters, therefore I suppose you wish them to be read; but did it never occur to you that in order to be read, they must be made known to those whom you desire to read them? and how can that be done unless their publication is advertised? You object to do that, but do not substitute any other method—if, indeed, there is any other—of informing us of the letters and books that you have written. Booksellers do not offer your volumes, because your conditions of sale do not allow them to make a fair profit. Their customers can purchase the books as cheap as the book-dealer, and with as little trouble as an application to him would give them2—supposing they have accidentally heard of the books. Like many thousands more in this country of black faces and horny hands, I am imperfectly educated, but desirous to learn, and able, without much self-denial or any inconvenience, to purchase your volumes at a doctor’s fee, or two fees each if you fix it so. Some of your books I possess, and the advantages I have received from the study of them makes me desirous that they should be more widely known and read. Commerce is too often a dishonest selfish scramble: employers and employed are at variance when their interests are identical. Daily toil does not obliterate our taste for art, and is it not desirable that those who have the means to gratify that taste should be able to know the right and the wrong in it, and recognise noble art when they see it? Upon all this you have written much in your books, but if the books are not known, it is as if unwritten, of even worse, because it is needful work not doing the good it might do.