SHAM ADMIRATION IN LITERATURE. 53 



worse than ever about Milton. On that same evening, while some 

 folks were talking about Mr. Morris's " Earthly Paradise," I heard a 

 scornful voice exclaim, " Oh ! give me ' Paradise Lost,' " and with that 

 gentleman I did have it out. I promptly subjected him to cross- 

 examination, and drove him to that extremity that he was compelled 

 to admit he had never read a word of Milton for forty years, and even 

 then only in extracts from " Enfield's Speaker." 



With Shakespeare though there is a good deal of lying about him 

 the case is different, and especially with elderly people ; for " in their 

 day," as they pathetically term it, Shakespeare was played everywhere, 

 and every one went to the play. They do not read him, but they rec- 

 ollect him ; they are well acquainted with his beauties that is, with 

 the better known of them and can quote him with manifest apprecia- 

 tion. They are, intellectually, in a position much superior to that of 

 a fashionable lady of my acquaintance who informed me that her 

 daughters were going to the theatre that night to see Shakespeare's 

 " Turning of the Screw." 



The writer who has done most, without I suppose intending it, to 

 promote hypocrisy iu literature is Macaulay. His " every schoolboy 

 knows " has frightened thousands into pretending to know authors 

 with whom they have not even a bowing acquaintance. It is amazing 

 that a man who had read so much should have written so contempt- 

 uously of those who have read but little ; one would have thought 

 that the consciousness of superiority would have forbidden such inso- 

 lence, or that his reading would have been extensive enough to teach 

 him at least how little he had read of what there was to read ; since 

 he read some things works of imagination and humor, for example 

 to such very little purpose, he might really have bragged a little less. 

 One feels quite grateful to Macaulay, however, for avowing his belief 

 that he was the only man who had read through the " Faerie Queen " ; 

 since that exonerates everybody I do not say from reading it, because 

 the supposition is preposterous but from the necessity of pretending 

 to have read it. The pleasure derived from that poem to most minds 

 is, I am convinced, analogous to that already spoken of as being im- 

 parted by a foreign author : namely, the satisfaction at finding it in 

 places intelligible. For the few who possess the poetic faculty it has 

 great beauties, but I observe, from the extracts that appear in poetic 

 selections and the like, that the most tedious and even the most mon- 

 strous passages are often the most admired. The case of Spenser in 

 this respect which does not stand alone in ancient English literature 

 has a curious parallel in art, where people are positively found to go 

 into ecstasies over a distorted limb or a ludicrous inversion of perspec- 

 tive, simply because it is tbe work of an old master, who knew no 

 better, or followed the fashion of his time. 



Leigh Hunt read the " Faerie Queen," by the by, as almost every- 

 thing else that has been written in the English tongue, and even Ma- 



