Hear, too, what Byron says:—

"A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure-critics all are ready-made;
Take hackneyed jokes from Miller, got by rote,
With just enough of learning to misquote;
A mind well skilled to find or forge a fault;
A turn for punning, call it Attic salt.

Fear not to lie-'twill seem a sharper hit;
Shrink not from blasphemy-'twill pass for wit;
Care not for feeling-pass your proper jest,
And stand a critic, hated yet caressed.

"And shall we own such judgments? No! as soon
Seek roses in December-ice in June,
Hope constancy in wind or corn in chaff,
Believe a woman or an epitaph,

Or any other thing that's false, before

You trust in critics, who themselves are sore."

Shenstone, in his "Essays on Men and Manners," remarks that critics remind him of "certain animals called asses, which, by nibbling vines, taught men the advantage of pruning them." Wordsworth called reviewing "an inglorious employment." Southey, who subsequently became a reviewer himself, styled it "the ungentle craft." Carlyle spoke of critics as "the flesh-flies of literature." Tupper says, "Pens are poniards in their hands; an inkstand the fountain of detraction." Tennyson speaks of "the chorus of indolent reviewers -irresponsible, indolent reviewers." And Oliver

Wendell Holmes declares it to be "a blessed thing that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left."

Even any one, unfamiliar with the circumstances under which some of these bitter things were written, can very readily jump to the conclusion that they were inspired by the vengeful promptings of lex talionis. An author is "cut up," his most ambitious efforts are ridiculed, the results of his most diligent research are pronounced inaccurate; —is it any wonder that he should feel sore and vindictive, and should denounce with indiscriminate scorn the whole critic tribe? We are all very human, and when the judgment passed upon us seems unfair, or fails to do justice to our intentions, or is spiteful, or flippant, or "damns us with faint praise," we cannot always help rebelling against the authority that condemns us, and crying out, not only against this particular judge, but against all judges, as being ignorant, and prejudiced, and partial, and vowing that there is no such thing as fair appreciation and a due recognition of honest worth-no, not at all. There is a good deal of pugnacity in men of letters, and even authors whose works have won immortality for them have not, in many instances, thought it

beneath their dignity to launch out into angry reprisals when some anonymous scribe has given forth his depreciatory verdict.

It does not follow, though, that criticism deserves all the hard things that have been said of it. We hear very little about the other side of the account. When a writer is praised, he is in no hurry to admit that the judicious approbation of the critic has contributed to his fame. No! he puts it all down to his own merit. The critic has done no more than his duty; if he had done less, he would have been guilty of injustice. No record is published by authors of the good services which the critics have done them. Rarely indeed does any writer, or painter, or actor step frankly forward and say, "I owe to the timely appreciation of the press no small measure of my success." And yet the confession might be made in hundreds, nay, in thousands of cases. Granting that genius is sometimes able to dispense with such aids, and to fight its own way to recognition without them, still the records of Literature and Art are full of instances of men who must have had to struggle on through weary years of obscurity, if an appreciative estimate of their worth by some of these same despised critics had not brought them into notice and instructed the

public as to their quality. The fact is there are critics and critics. In the grumblings of authors, unfortunately, we hear only of one sort. They are all tarred with the same brush. No good thing, it is scornfully assumed, can come out of such a Nazareth. The detractors of criticism have had experience of only one side of it, and they judge from that, without regard to the possibility of there being another and a better side. They have been smitten and they are sore. Hinc illa lachrymæ ! Hence these railings and revilings!

CHAPTER III.

HYPERCRITICISM AND SLASHING CRITICISM.

HE critic's responsibility is a serious one.
He is armed with tremendous strength.

It is in his power with a few strokes of a heedless pen to deface, if not to demolish, the fair fabric of a lifelong work, to bruise the anxious heart of struggling but unknown merit, to do a cruel wrong by disparaging a work which he has barely examined, and which he has not troubled himself to understand. He has a giant's strength, not altogether by virtue of his own skill, but by virtue of the influence and circulation of the journal or review for which he writes. Woe be unto him if he uses it tyrannously! That it has been used tyrannously one need only turn to the back numbers of the older reviews to prove. "Cutting up" at one time almost became a profession. There were reviewers who vied with each other in the production of destructive criticism. So savage, and in many cases so untruthful,