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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



the volume publication in these three languages, 

 year by year: you will say the quantity is pro- 

 digious — overwhelming, if it were to be supposed 

 that any reader must read it all. But this is not 

 the case : what the publisher's table offers is a 

 choice — something for all tastes : one reads one 

 book, another another. As I divided books into 

 two classes, books of special information and 

 books of general literature, so readers must now 

 be divided into two classes — the general public 

 and the professional literary man : the author, or 

 critic, let us call him. I am not proposing that 

 the general public should read, or look at, all this 

 mass of current literature. It would be prepos- 

 terous to think of it. You must read by selec- 

 tion ; but for your selection you will be guided — 

 you are so in fact — by the opinion of those whom 

 I must now speak of as a class, by the name of 

 critics. 



Criticism is a profession, and, as you will have 

 gathered from what has been said, an arduous 

 profession ; the responsibility great, the labor 

 heavy. Literature is not your profession — I 

 speak to you as the general public — it is at most 

 a solace of your leisure hours ; but the critic, he 

 who sits on the judgment-seat of letters, and has 

 to acquit or condemn, to examine how each writer 

 has executed his task, to guide the reading com- 

 munity by distinguishing the good and censuring 

 the bad — he really holds an educational office 

 which is above that of any professor or doctor, 

 inasmuch as the doctor of laws or of divinity is 

 authorized to speak to his own faculty, whereas 

 the critic speaks to the whole republic of letters. 

 What is recreation to you is business to the critic, 

 and his business is to keep himself acquainted 

 with the course of publication in at least these 

 three languages. Looking, then, at the mass and 

 volume of printed matter to be thus daily and 

 hourly sifted, you cannot think that the profession 

 of critic is a sinecure. 



And before he can be qualified to take his seat 

 on the bench and dispense the law, consider 

 what a lengthened course of professional training 

 must have been gone through by our critic or ju- 

 dicial reader. When he has once entered upon 

 his functions, his whole time will be consumed, 

 and his powers of attention strained to the ut- 

 most, in the effort to keep abreast of that contem- 

 porary literature which he is to watch and report 

 upon. But no one can have any pretension to 

 judge of the literature of the day who has not 

 had a thorough training in the literature of the 

 past. The critic must have been apprenticed to 

 his profession. 



It has been calculated that in a very advanced 

 and ramified science, e. g., chemistry, fourteen 

 years are required by the student to overtake 

 knowledge as it now stands. That is to say, that 

 to learn what is known, before you can proceed 

 to institute new experiments, fourteen years are 

 necessary — twice the time which the old law ex- 

 acted of an apprentice bound to any trade. The 

 fifth of Elizabeth, which used to be known as 

 the statute of apprenticeship, enacted that no 

 person should for the future exercise any trade, 

 craft, or mystery, unless he had previously served 

 to it an apprenticeship of seven years at least. 

 This enactment of 1563 was but the legislative 

 sanction of what had been for centuries the by- 

 law of the trade-guilds. This by-law had ruled, 

 not in England only, but over all the civilized 

 countries of Europe. It was a by-law that had 

 not been confined to trades. It "had extended 

 over the arts and over the liberal professions. 

 University degrees are nothing more than the ap- 

 plication of this by-law to the learned profes- 

 sions. It required study for twenty-eight academ- 

 ical terms, i. e., seven years, to qualify for the 

 degree of M. A. in the universities. Bather, I 

 would say, that the line was not then drawn be- 

 tween the mechanical and the liberal branches 

 of human endeavor ; both were alike designated 

 " Arts ; " and the term " universities," now re- 

 stricted to the bodies which profess theoretical 

 science, was then the common appellation of all 

 corporations and trade-guilds, as well as the so- 

 called Universities of Paris and Bologna. 



Begarding literature as a separate art, we 

 might ask, " How long would it require to go 

 through the whole of it to become a master of 

 this art ? " Even taking the narrowest definition 

 of literature, it seems a vast surface to travel 

 over, from Homer down to our own day ! I say 

 the surface, because no one supposes it necessary 

 to read every line of every book which can call 

 itself literature. Bemember that, in studying the 

 literature of the past, other countries than France 

 and Germany come in. I have dispensed our 

 critic from occupying himself with the Italian 

 and Spanish books of to-day. But with the books 

 of the past it is different. Italy, in the fifteenth 

 and sixteenth centuries, was the most civilized 

 and literary country in Europe. And Spain has 

 its classical writers. Their mere mass is pro- 

 digious. Life in Italy was rich and varied, and 

 consequently so were the materials for that true 

 narrative which is stranger than fiction. Villari 

 has computed that the Italian republics of the 

 middle ages enjoyed a total of 7,200 revolutions, 



