Note 54 — LORD BYRON: (continued 4)

It would be difficult to describe more strongly or more convincingly than Lord Byron has done in this letter the sort of petty, but thwarting obstructions and distractions which are at present thrown across the path of men of real talent by that swarm of minor critics and pretenders with whom the want of a vent in other professions has crowded all the walks of literature. Nor is it only the writers of the day that suffer from this multifarious rush into the mart;—the readers also, from having (as Lord Byron expresses it in another letter) "the superficies of too many things presented to them at once," come to lose by degrees their powers of discrimination; and, in the same manner as the palate becomes confused in trying various wines, so the public taste declines in proportion as the impressions to which it is exposed multiply.