Text: Anonymous, “Literary Shams,” Southern Punch (Richmond, VA), vol. I, no. 17, p. 2. cols. 1-2

[page 2, column 2, continued:]

LITERARY SHAMS.

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THERE ONCE dwelt in this country, a remarkable genius whom men called Edgar A. Poe. He lashed the shams in the world of letters, right and left. Great, gifted, daring, and knowing well that idiosyncracy of the imposters which lead them to rush in, like fools, where angels fear to tread, he tied a whip-lash to his pen, and excoriated the shams until they shrieked with pain, and fled from the grand Temple of Genius. For this good service to literature, he inherited the hatred of big bogus and little bogus in the world of letters. He kept on, however, in his work of excoriation and expulsion, and the genus sham was intensely glad when death arrested his progress in Baltimore.

We require a little more lightning to clear the atmosphere; a few more Poes to use the whip-lash, for the race of shams increase rapidly.

Your genuine sham is full of spleen and envy. He can not bear to see youth endowed with powers beyond the appreciation of the modicum of brains which Heaven has charitably given him for ordinary purposes, shoot ahead in the race for fame. Yet he bows slavishly down to men who have achieved even an ephemeral reputation by the publication of a book, glorifying a name with stentorian lungs.

Everything that comes from the pen of well known authors, whether superb or ridiculous, is the subject of wholesale praise [column 2:] for your sham is a regular toady. A “name” is everything with him.

But woe to unheralded writers. The shams will have nothing to do with them. Their bright, young genius is overlooked, often derided. The sham delights to use the literary stilletto, with which to stab to death if he can, incipient reputation, or with puerile irony, which he calls criticism, gives the cold shoulder instead of a blow.

Your true litterateur despises shams, and has a fervent admiration for genius in all its protean phases. lie is proverbially high-toned, liberal and just. He holds out a helping hand to the clever young writer, while he does not fail to see the shortcomings of the old writer!

Thus refined, ennobled, exalted by the inborn and cultivated graces of literature, the soul of chivalry, honor and justice, the real litterateur, rejoices when he discovers a star coming up on the horizon of letters, beautiful and glittering.

Refusing to bow down and worship every golden calf set up in the wilderness, yet always rendering unto every recognized Caesar the things that are Caesar's, the opinions of the real litterateur, unlike those of the sham, go sounding down the aisles of Time