In the following remarks some broad general principles, making disaster
almost inevitable, will first be offered, and then special methods of
failing in all special departments of letters will be ungrudgingly
communicated. It is not enough to attain failure, we should deserve it.
The writer, by way of insuring complete confidence, would modestly
mention that he has had ample opportunities of study in this branch of
knowledge. While sifting for five or six years the volunteered
contributions to a popular periodical, he has received and considered
some hundredweights of manuscript. In all these myriad contributions he
has not found thirty pieces which rose even to the ordinary dead level of
magazine work. He has thus enjoyed unrivalled chances of examining such
modes of missing success as spontaneously occur to the human intellect,
to the unaided ingenuity of men, women, and children. {1}
He who would fail in literature cannot begin too early to neglect his
education, and to adopt every opportunity of not observing life and
character. None of us is so young but that he may make himself perfect
in writing an illegible hand.
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