"Vie t)pectator, ft Ailap 170, 1851
LITERARY PATRONAGE
DEALING with " the seedy author" question in his happiest vein of satire, Mr. Thackeray has done much to accomplish his own wish, that the miserable literary back of George the Third's time should be hissed out of society. "The opprissed author" is " a disreputable old phantom"; and when Mr. Thackeray declares that he does not believe in patrons, his belief coincides with a social fact of our day. Authors do not win their way to celebrity or sustenance by playing the lickspittle, or haunting the halls of the great to pick up little crumbs on sufferance, like a stray dog. . . . The great prizes of the day will be won by those whose works hit, not the strong elemental feelings which move the bulk of mankind, still left by civilisation below the book-purchasing level of means, nor the most exalted and refined tasAe, but human nature in that peculiar state of develop- ment. half cultivated, half narrowed, which is proper to what the dialect of the day calls the middle class. Mr. Thackeray will have no difficulty in perceiving that the highest style of satire, eminently successful though it may be, is not the most successful ; the middle-class consumer prefers, not the highest style of portrait-painting. but that portrait of his own class which is made by one of his own class, and does not rise to to difficult a gradient above his own range of ideas.
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