Note (return) — SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

There is a fashion in reading as well as in dress, which lasts only for a season. One would imagine that books were, like women, the worse for being old;2 that they have a pleasure in being read for the first time; that they open their leaves more cordially; that the spirit of enjoyment wears out with the spirit of novelty; and that, after a certain age, it is high time to put them on the shelf. This conceit seems to be followed up in practice. What is it to me that another—that hundreds or thousands have in all ages read a work? Is it on this account the less likely to give me pleasure, because it has delighted so many others? Or can I taste this pleasure by proxy? Or am I in any degree the wiser for their knowledge? Yet this might appear to be the inference. Their having read the work may be said to act upon us by sympathy, and the knowledge which so many other persons have of its contents deadens our curiosity and interest altogether. We set aside the subject as one on which others have made up their minds for us, (as if we really could have ideas in their heads,) and are quite on the alert for the next new work, teeming hot from the press, which we shall be the first to read, to criticise, and pass an opinion on. Oh, delightful! To cut open the leaves, to inhale the fragrance of the scarcely-dry paper, to examine the type, to see who is the printer, (which is some clue to the value that is set upon the work,) to launch out into regions of thought and invention never trod till now, and to explore characters that never met a human eye before—this is a luxury worth sacrificing a dinner party, or a few hours of a spare morning to. Who, indeed, when the work is critical and full of expectation, would venture to dine out, or to face a coterie of blue stockings in the evening, without having gone through this ordeal, or at least without, hastily turning over a few of the first pages while dressing, to be able to say that the beginning does not promise much, or to tell the name of the heroine?