Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?
Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among its fruits.

There are literary green-groceries at every corner, which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple.

It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and writing.

The temptation of money and fame is too great for young people.

Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr .---- we won't say who,--editor of the--we won't say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron?
Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory?
I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.
-- Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.