affected by the criticisms, true and false, which he daily experienced, that they contributed to hasten his death. Ritson's extreme irritability closed in lunacy, while the ignorant reviewers, in the shape of assassins, were haunting his death-bed. Scott of Amwell never recovered from a ludicrous criticism written by a physician who never pretended to poetical taste. To these instances we may add the fate of the Abbé Cassagne, a man of learning and not destitute of talents. He was intended for one of the preachers at court; but he had hardly made himself known in the pulpit when he was struck by the lightning of Boileau's muse. He felt so acutely the caustic verses, that they rendered him almost incapable of literary labour; in the prime of life he became melancholy, and shortly afterwards became insane. A modern painter, it is known, never recovered from the biting ridicule of a popular but malignant wit. Cummyns, a celebrated Quaker, confessed he died of an anonymous letter in a public paper, which, said he, 'fastened on my heart, and threw me into this slow fever.' The feathered arrow of an epigram has sometimes been wet with the heart's blood of its victim. Fortune has been lost, reputation destroyed, and every charity of

life extinguished by the inhumanity of inconsiderate wit."

Shelley was driven into exile by the savage chorus of calumnious critics. His life was embittered to no slight extent by the malignancy and brutality of unsympathetic reviewers. The "Quarterly Review" wielded its poleaxe over his head as it did over the heads of other bright spirits whom the truculent Gifford and his crew of butchers were unable to comprehend. Mr. J. A. Symonds shows us, in his delightful sketch of Shelley, what an effect this treatment had in checking his enthusiasm for composition. "My faculties are shaken to atoms and torpid," he says in a letter to Leigh Hunt. "I can write nothing." And again, "It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write." Not only was Shelley's life made unhappy, but his productiveness as a poet was impaired by the relentless ferocity with which every new effort was attacked.

It is extremely probable that those same gentlemen who so flippantly assail an author's productions, and hold them up to ridicule or scorn, would be the first to wince if they were

submitted to similar treatment themselves. "We do not find, moreover," says the author of "Friends in Council," "that severe critics, when their turn comes to have their shadow set dancing · on the white sheet in the lecture-room, have attained that extreme indifference to concentrated solar light and scientific comment, which should make them unable to imagine what are the sensations of other men when exhibited to the staring public in this remorseless fashion."

There is a season for everything, and there is a season for stern, relentless criticism. Remembering the large power and ever-growing influence of criticism, it must be recognised that the grave responsibility rests on those who help to form it of directing it, not only for the intellectual information, but also for the moral guidance, of the multitude whom they profess to lead. If critics are faithless to the principles of good taste and public decency,-if the sentinels of Literature and the Drama fall asleep at their posts,—if those who profess to steer, guide us on to the rocks of a licentious fiction or the quicksands of an impure stage, a solemn, it may even be said an awful, responsibility rests at their doors. The immoral and the false, the vicious and the degrading,

deserve the critic's castigation, and it should be applied with all the fearless freedom consistent with dignity, honesty, and self-control. The law of libel, which curbs the license and personalism of the press, throws no ægis around those who degrade literature with the poison of insidious vice. The critic is free to lay upon them the lash of his indignation without hindrance. Nay, more, it is his duty to do so; and if he evades that duty or flinches from it, or temporises with the evil, or glosses it over with seeming toleration, he betrays a great and serious trust, and becomes an accessory in a mischief of the direst kind. The late Lord Chief-Justice Cockburn once said from the judgment-seat, that "those who, in their capacity as literary critics, are, so to speak, prosecutors on behalf of the public, should be allowed to bring to the bar of public opinion those who are guilty of delinquencies against good taste, against morality, or against religion;" and if their case be a just one, and their judgment equitable and honest, they are warranted in using the strongest language of warning and the most withering words of rebuke.

CHAPTER IV.

TURNING THE TABLES ON THE CRITICS.

HE critics have not always been suffered to have it all their own way. Fre

quently, not only have their judgments been challenged, but they themselves have been punished, in one way or another, by the vengeful author. It is not every one who dies of chagrin or shrinks back into obscurity when the critic has dealt with him unsparingly. Nowadays, an

unjust criticism, if it is worth taking any notice of at all, is generally referred to the arbitrament of the law-courts,—at all events, in England. In France, where folly still coquettes with murder in the duello, the aggrieved party appeals to the small sword, and tries to "wash his spear" in the blood of his critic. In the less civilised parts of America, a critic who ventured to be very severe would stand a good chance of being "cowhided,"