166 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



own things and the things of others." (Arnold's 

 "Essays.") 



We require of our thoroughly furnished critic 

 that he should have prepared himself for his pro- 

 fession by a comprehensive study of all that 

 human thought, experience, and imagination, have 

 stored up for us. When we have used all the 

 short cuts to this goal which art and Nature have 

 provided, how many years will such an appren- 

 ticeship require? The data are wanting ou 

 which to found a calculation. Can the work be 

 got through in seven years, in twice seven, or in 

 three times seven ? I do not know. Archbishop 

 Usher at twenty began to read the Fathers, Greek 

 and Latin, with the resolution of reading them 

 through. The task was achieved in nineteen 

 years. Hammond, at Oxford, read thirteen hours 

 a day (Life of Usher. Life of Hammond, by Fell). 

 Milton's "industrious and select reading," in 

 preparation for the great work to which he dedi- 

 cated a whole life, long choosing, and late begin- 

 ning, are as well known as the thirty years spent 

 by Edward Gibbon in preparing for and in com- 

 posing his history. 



Of course in this, as in other trades, a man 

 learns while he practises. Buffon told a friend 

 that, after passing fifty years at his desk, he was 

 every day learning to write. The critic's judgment 

 matures by many failures. Without these three 

 elements — time, industry, arduous endeavor — no 

 man can attain to be a supreme judge of literary 

 worth. Perhaps you have been accustomed to set 

 before yourselves quite another ideal of the literary 

 life. You have thought the business of reviewing 

 a lazy profession, the resource of men who wanted 

 industry or talent, who were, in short, fit for noth- 

 ing better, a profession largely adopted by brief- 

 less barristers, by incompetent clerks, by green 

 youths fresh from college examinations, and gen- 

 erally by men who shirk hard work — in fact, an 

 easy-chair and slipper business. You have, per- 

 haps, supposed that anybody can write a review, 

 that essay-writing is as easy as talking, that it is 

 only a matter of cheek and fluency. You have 

 imagined that a quarterly or a weekly reviewer 

 merely gets his knowledge of the subject in hand 

 out of the book he has under review ; that he, 

 thereupon, dishonestly assumes to have known 

 all about it, and with voluble impertinence goes 

 on to retail this newly-acquired information as if 

 it were his own, seasoning it with sneers and sar- 

 casms at the author from whom he is stealing. 

 I know these things are said. I have heard even 

 respectable reviews and magazines accused of 

 paying for this sort of thing by the column, i. e., 



' giving a pecuuiary inducement to fill out paper 

 j with words — to make copy, or padding, as it is 

 called. I don't know if these things are done in 

 j practice. If they are, they are fraudulent, and 

 ! must, I should think, come within the act against 

 adulteration. What I have set before you in the 

 above outline is the honest critic who gives to 

 his calling the devotion of a life, prepares him- 

 self by antecedent study, and continues through 

 the whole of his career to make daily new acqui- 

 sitions and to cultivate his susceptibility to new 

 impressions. 



Such are the qualifications of the teacher, of 

 the writer of books. I turn now from the author 

 to the reader, from the producer to the consumer. 

 You to whom I now speak are a portion of the 

 public ; you represent the consumer. And first, 

 what is the mechanism by which the consumer is 

 provided with his article ? The English are not 

 a book-storing people. Each family has not, as 

 a rule, its own library. In great country-houses, 

 it is true, there is always the library. Many 

 treasures are in these old repositories — the accu- 

 mulated store of half a dozen generations. They 

 often go back to Queen Anne, the great book- 

 diffusing 'period of our annals; sometimes, but 

 more rarely, to the seventeenth century. The 

 family history may be read in the successive 

 strata, superimposed, like geological strata, one 

 on the other. The learned literature of the 

 seventeenth century, largely composed in Latin, 

 its Elzevirs, and its Variorum classics, will often 

 be found relegated to a garret. These books 

 have come to be regarded as lumber. They are 

 only not cleared out and dispatched to Sotheby's, 

 because the cost of removal would exceed their 

 produce at the auction. This, though hoisted up 

 to the garret by an upheaval, is in point of time 

 the earliest stratum. Upon this will be found a 

 bed of theological pamphlets mostly in small 

 quarto, in which lurk the ashes of passion, once 

 fired by the Revolution of 16S8, the non-juring 

 pamphlets, the Dr. Sacheverell pamphlets, the 

 Bangorian controversy. In the great library on 

 the ground-floor we shall find the earliest stratum 

 to consist of the splendid quartos, on thick paper 

 with wide margin, of Queen Anne's time. The 

 Spectator, the Tatler, Pope's Homer, a subscrip- 

 tion copy; the folios of Carte and Echard, and 

 so down the century over Junius and Chester- 

 field's " Letters " to the first editions of Sir Walter 

 Scott's poems. The mere titles of such a collec- 

 tion, or accretion, form a history of literature. 

 : But it is only in our old country-houses that such 



