"
--Emily Foster.
....authors are particularly candid in admitting the faults of their
friends.
The governor, from the stern of his schooner, gave a short but truly
patriarchal address to his citizens, wherein he recommended them to
comport like loyal and peaceable subjects,--to go to church regularly on
Sundays, and to mind their business all the week besides. That the women
should be dutiful and affectionate to their husbands,--looking after
nobody's concerns but their own,--eschewing all gossipings and morning
gaddings,--and carrying short tongues and long petticoats. That the men
should abstain from intermeddling in public concerns, intrusting the
cares of government to the officers appointed to support them, staying at
home, like good citizens, making money for themselves, and getting
children for the benefit of their country.
It happens to the princes of literature to encounter periods of varying
duration when their names are revered and their books are not read. The
growth, not to say the fluctuation, of Shakespeare's popularity is one of
the curiosities of literary history. Worshiped by his contemporaries,
apostrophized by Milton only fourteen pears after his death as the "dear
son of memory, great heir to fame,"--"So sepulchred in such pomp dost
lie, That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"--he was neglected
by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes of opinion in the
eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt
if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a
refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to the rudeness of his
"disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach of barbarism" which
the English nation had suffered from all its neighbors.
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