FullReads

“But what is to become of the trade?” cried a frantic bookseller.

“O, by all means, let them accompany their merchandise,” coolly
observed an author. “It will be a noble funeral-pile!”

The truth was, that the human race had now reached a stage of
progress so far beyond what the wisest and wittiest men of former
ages had ever dreamed of, that it would have been a manifest
absurdity to allow the earth to be any longer encumbered with their
poor achievements in the literary line. Accordingly a thorough and
searching investigation had swept the booksellers’ shops, hawkers’
stands, public and private libraries, and even the little book-shelf
by the country fireside, and had brought the world’s entire mass of
printed paper, bound or in sheets, to swell the already mountain
bulk of our illustrious bonfire. Thick, heavy folios, containing the
labors of lexicographers, commentators, and encyclopedists, were
flung in, and, falling among the embers with a leaden thump,
smouldered away to ashes like rotten wood. The small, richly gilt
French tomes of the last age, with the hundred volumes of Voltaire
among them, went off in a brilliant shower of sparkles and little
jets of flame; while the current literature of the same nation
burned red and blue, and threw an infernal light over the visages of
the spectators, converting them all to the aspect of party-colored
fiends. A collection of German stories emitted a scent of
brimstone. The English standard authors made excellent fuel,
generally exhibiting the properties of sound oak logs. Milton’s
works, in particular, sent up a powerful blaze, gradually reddening
into a coal, which promised to endure longer than almost any other
material of the pile. From Shakespeare there gushed a flame of such
marvellous splendor that men shaded their eyes as against the sun’s
meridian glory; nor even when the works of his own elucidators were
flung upon him did he cease to flash forth a dazzling radiance from
beneath the ponderous heap. It is my belief that he is still
blazing as fervidly as ever.

“Could a poet but light a lamp at that glorious flame,” remarked I,
“he might then consume the midnight oil to some good purpose.”

“That is the very thing which modern poets have been too apt to do,
or at least to attempt,” answered a critic. “The chief benefit to
be expected from this conflagration of past literature undoubtedly
is, that writers will henceforth be compelled to light their lamps
at the sun or stars.”

“If they can reach so high,” said I; “but that task requires a
giant, who may afterwards distribute the light among inferior men.
It is not every one that can steal the fire from heaven like
Prometheus; but, when once he had done the deed, a thousand hearths
were kindled by it.”

It amazed me much to observe how indefinite was the proportion
between the physical mass of any given author and the property of
brilliant and long-continued combustion. For instance, there was
not a quarto volume of the last century–nor, indeed, of the
present–that could compete in that particular with a child’s little
gilt-covered book, containing Mother Goose’s Melodies. The Life
and Death of Tom Thumb outlasted the biography of Marlborough. An
epic, indeed a dozen of them, was converted to white ashes before
the single sheet of an old ballad was half consumed. In more than
one case, too, when volumes of applauded verse proved incapable of
anything better than a stifling smoke, an unregarded ditty of some
nameless bard–perchance in the corner of a newspaper–soared up
among the stars with a flame as brilliant as their own. Speaking of
the properties of flame, methought Shelley’s poetry emitted a purer
light than almost any other productions of his day, contrasting
beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of black
vapor that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron. As
for Tom Moore, some of his songs diffused an odor like a burning
pastil.