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the same profession as the Rothschilds; and yet the humblest private in the ranks of literature believes that, by a kind of reflected greatness, he participates in the glory that has been achieved by his illustrious predecessors and contemporaries. He insists upon claiming flattering recognition for merits not his own, and expects applause solely because he belongs to the army in which others have victoriously fought—just as I have seen in the streets the master of an immense mastiff taking to himself the attention and admiration meant by passengers for the powerful brute he was leading by a string.

The pretence that the literary calling is more sacred than others, or should be regulated by different maxims from those by which men of any other profession are guided, is a tradition derived from past ages, and, as might be supposed, originated with literary men themselves. At one time, however, it had foundation on fact. The priesthood were the sole literary men. Its members united in their persons the writing and the sacred functions. They alone were clerks. It was not, therefore, unreasonable they should require and receive the respect due from ignorance to obvious and transcendent superiority. But nobody will seriously maintain that a similar reason exists in our time for its continuance, since, to speak with designed discretion, the clergy

TRADITION TO BE ABANDONED.

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are certainly not more intelligent than the laity, nor are those who print their opinions better informed than those who do not. It would be for the interests of literature and of literary men themselves that the pretence should now be abandoned.

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HE number of literary men having increased to such a degree as to include almost everybody with literary tastes, it is manifest that all who are addicted to being clever could not advantageously employ themselves in original composition; their genius, therefore, with convenience to themselves, and it is thought with advantage to the public, has taken a critical direction. Their activity chiefly displays itself in criticism; the age, in literature, as in other matters, is nothing if not critical. Seeing the competition that within these circumstances must necessarily exist, it is not unreasonable to expect the art to have reached the degree of perfection of which it is susceptible. But it is notorious that it has made only a slight advance in that desirable direction. Although more than two hundred years have now elapsed since what may be called the invention of

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ITS IMPERFECTIONS.

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periodical criticism by Denis de Salo and his footman, little progress seems to have been effected in it, as far as England is concerned. In Germanyand, only in a less degree, in France-it has undergone great improvements; but, as all who pay attention to its development among ourselves cannot fail to notice, its condition in this country is most deplorable. This misfortune is, no doubt, partly owing to the exigencies of daily or weekly publication. The press, like time and tide, waits for no man; and it will not be denied that the views of a man who writes with the printer at his door must necessarily be hastily and prematurely expressed. But it is chiefly due to the false notion entertained by critics of the aim and objects of the art they profess, and to the fact that they form their judgments from a local and temporal point of view instead of from a universal and permanent. Criticism, regulated by fashion, must be inoperative, just as the creative literature of every age, disfigured by such a blemish, has become inoperative.

Practising critics, when they do not philosophise from their own idiosyncracies, become advocates of a cause. They found their opinions on what is incident, and not permanent. They are without an intelligible and trustworthy standard whereby to test the merit of works that come before them; but

grope their way to the misbegotten verdicts with which we are undeservedly distracted. And so it happens that the history of our literature abounds in wellremembered examples of their ridiculous blunders. So near-sighted, indeed, have been the majority of them, that one age has seldom ratified the verdicts delivered by its predecessor; and, in innumerable instances, reversals of judgment have taken place during the lifetime of the critics by whom they were pronounced. It is well known that—according to the Scottish reviewers and their friends, who, at the beginning of our century, stormed the strongholds of literary criticism, and infused into the profession an amount of confident assertion that has since appeared astounding-Wordsworth was a dolt, Southey a common-place rhymester, Coleridge a madman, and Byron a writer whose productions were unhealthy rubbish or worse. Opposed to these not over-cautious arbiters of literature were other arbiters equally certain on the other side. Such sorry discordance is, unfortunately, still occurring, and will continue to occur so long as criticism is founded on principles dependent on fashion.

Of the flourishing condition of musical, dramatic, and fine arts' criticism I shall not now venture to pronounce. From presumably competent persons I hear, on all hands, loud and deep complaints of its

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