Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1882 — Literary Destinies. [ARTICLE]

Literary Destinies.

m Spectator. Tine perversities of literary destiny are certainly felrange. Charles Lamb spent the better part of his life upon tne summit of a lofty stool in a London office, copying words aud figures into a series bf folios. Miss Braddon is conducted by inscrutable fate to the n6vaUst’s desk, there io > squander a forty-clerk power of persistent penmanship in turning romance into ridicule. - Slip Has IRtle. imagination, an indifferent taste, and ho humor; and yet stye fias written nearly two shore of novels, which have been read by hundred of thousands of readers, and the .pages of ’which are unstained, so far as we are aware, by anything #orfe than, sensationalism and vapidity. Where to look for a parallel to such a tour de force wc know not. il Ouida’s” “success” is due to her unfaiTthg prui riency: Balzac’s to* his inexhaustible Kahlua f rGcprge Klioi’sjb ker intellecmm sympathy. Miss Braddon, without tbe aid of either pruriency, genius, or Intellectual sympathy, is almost as widely known, and is perhaps more load than any of thebemfe-gientioned writers. Whore is the explanation of this anomaly to be soughtrWheremust hi* * largo class of minds .’which can find repose neither hr deep, nor iu waking idleness, but only in a superficial mental movement, which" shall deceive the mind proper into fancying itself occupied,tand thus enable it to steal some .actual rest. Now, undoubtedly no ifteirtal movement can be more superficial than that produced by an uncritical perusal of Miss Braddou’s novels, and therefore no inward calm more unruffled.