survived in Canadian waters only shows how wonderfully adapted the waters are to the production of fish. It cannot be too often insisted on that approaches to rivers should be free, and salmon caught by an industrious, active population as they are in Scotland and England. Then, indeed, the wildernesses of the St. Lawrence would blossom abundantly, and French Canadians might sit under their own maple-trees and pine-trees after having secured in a few years an independence for old age. In place of accumulating salmon in ice-houses along the coast until the obstructive engines have yielded up their prey and the steamer appears in each alternate week, every sweep of the net would bring in its prize, and one or two steamers would find profitable employment, daily, in collecting these and taking them to Bic, where ocean steamers could call in passing and bring them on to England, so that they would be in St. John's fish market in Liverpool in the same space of time as it used to take to convey them from the same localities to the Montreal or Kingston market ! It has been impossible to give more than a scanty outline of this interesting subject, and very many fishes on which I have copious notes have not even been mentioned, as it seemed better to leave these alone entirely, if by so doing a more pronounced expression could be given to the really important economic question.

ALFRED RIMMER.

CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM.

If you think he comes hither as a lion, it were a pity of his life. No; he is no such thing; he is a man as other men are, and indeed let him name his name and tell them plainly he is Snug the Joiner.-Midsummer Night's Dream.

I

T has been observed that the decomposition of what is best is the generation of what is worst, and perhaps nothing will illustrate the truth of this remark more fully and forcibly than the history of the use and abuse of the Art of Criticism. If the creative faculty is the most majestic and imposing of human prerogatives,-if it must rank first and highest in the estimation of all men—the judicial and appreciative faculty is scarcely less important. The poet must have an audience teacher and pupil, speaker and interpreter, must mutually act and re-act on one another. Genius, like the body which is its temple, requires nourishment and stimulus. It is incapable of supporting for any length of time an isolated existence. In primitive ages a poet can address himself immediately to the feelings of his hearers; he can touch simple chords; he can appeal, sure of sympathetic response, to the untutored instincts of our common nature: and the professional critic is not needed. But as civilisation advances, and society becomes more complex, art, too, assumes subtler phases. The poet, more and more estranged from the mass, addresses himself, not to the unlettered many, but to the cultivated few. Appealing at first to the feelings, he appeals later on to the feelings through the intellect. He requires an educated audience. Hence it becomes necessary to establish a sort of medium between the creative artist and the general public. These media are the critics. They not only introduce, but they interpret: on their decision depends, in the first instance at least, the success or failure of an authorthrough them he wins the ear of the world. Nor do the critic's duties end herc. In busy days like the present, when literary supply is far in excess of the demand, we leave our critics to taste for us, and the censors of the Reviews stand in the same relation to the public as the "reader" stands to an overburdened publisher. Thus the responsibility of the critic is twofold. He undertakes, by virtue of a tacit contract between himself and the public, to judge fairly and im

partially of the work submitted to him, to chastise and expose what is bad, to encourage what is promising, to praise what is good. At the same time he directs and even moulds public taste, and he is thus instrumental in insensibly determining the character and quality of contemporary literature. No power, therefore, is more potent for good than the power wielded by the sound and honest critic, and no power is more potent for evil than the power wielded by a prejudiced, incompetent, and dishonest critic. This is no place for enumerating and defining the qualifications which should be possessed by this responsible functionary: we will only observe that, had our representative critics pondered over that fine chapter in which Lucian draws the character of the true critic of history, we should, in all probability, have been spared some of the most humiliating episodes in the History of Letters. Since the beginning of this century most of our criticism has expressed itself either in publications which have confessedly identified themselves with certain political and literary cliques, or from independent writers who have been the disciples of some particular school, and who have consequently tried everything by the measure of the canons they have inherited. Thus criticism, which should emanate partly from educated sympathies, and partly from that "dry intelligence" which is as indispensable to the interpretation of art as it is to the investigation of science, has been corrupted at its very source-corrupted by political prejudice, by the bigotry of literary sectarianism, and by the idiosyncrasies of private individuals. We propose to give in the following paper a few examples of the vagaries in which the professors of the Art of Criticism have occasionally indulged.

Johnson divided critics into three classes-firstly, those who know no rules, but pronounce entirely from their natural tastes and feelings; secondly, those who know and judge by rules alone; and thirdly, those who know the rules but are above them. Nine-tenths of those who pass opinions on works of art, either cursorily in conversation or correspondence, or deliberately in critiques, belong to one of the first two classes, and it is among them we find some of our most exquisitely ludicrous critical curiosities. We will begin with the critics of our two greatest poets. It would not be true to say that Shakespeare was either neglected or even underrated by his contemporaries, but it is curious to observe how completely the world was blind to the merit of " Paradise Lost." One of the most illustrious of Milton's brother bards, Edmund Waller, refers to the great epic. poem as a tedious work by the blind old schoolmaster, in which there is nothing remarkable but the length; while a great critic of these

times, William Winstanley, in his "Lives of the Most Famous English Poets," thus disposes of our second greatest bard: "John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English poets, having written two heroic poems and a tragedy, namely, 'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and 'Samson Agonistes.' But his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honourable repute, had not he been a notorious traitor and most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed martyr king, Charles the First." But some of the most delicious morsels of criticism are to be found among the critics of the eighteenth century, especially when they condescend to deal with what they call the lucubrations of their rude predecessors. Foremost among these rude predecessors stands Shakespeare, and foremost among these dashing critics was Thomas Rymer. In his "Short View of Tragedy," he gives us a comment on "Othello." “The moral use of this fable "—he has been analysing the plot-" is very instructive. First, it may be a caution to all maidens of quality how, without their parents' consent, they run away with blackamoors. Secondly, it may be a warning to all good wives that they look well to their linen "(this alludes, of course, to the loss of the handkerchief). "Thirdly, this may be a lesson to husbands that before their jealousy be tragical the proof may be mathematical." Mr. Rymer is very indignant with Shakespeare for making his hero a blackamoor, and insulting the army by turning Iago into a soldier. Speaking of Desdemona he remarks that "there is nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen maid—no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly." With regard to what he calls expression, he, Mr. Rymer, says that "in the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more humanity than in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." He is very angry that the catastrophe should turn on a handkerchief. He proposes that the handkerchief should have been folded on the bridal couch, and that, when Othello was smothering Desdemona, "the fairy napkin might have started up to disarm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth." "Then might she in a trance for fear," he goes on to say, "have lain for dead; then might he, believing her dead, and touched with remorse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and truly represented in the theatre." The critic then makes some severe remarks on the dénouement of the plot: "Then for the

unravelling of the plot, as they call it, never was old Deputy Recorder in a country town, with his spectacles on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so blundered and bedoltified as is our poet to have a good riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. . . . What can remain with the audience to carry home with them? How can it work but to delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt our appetite, and fill our head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre and jingle-jangle beyond what all the parish clerks in London could ever pretend to!"

He concludes by adding that his only hope is that the audience will go to the play as they go to church, "sit still, look on one another, make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they would a sermon." Mr. Rymer next goes on to discuss "Julius Cæsar.” He is exceedingly indignant that Shakespeare should have presumed to meddle with the Romans. He might be "familiar with Othello and Iago as his own natural acquaintance, but Cæsar and Brutus were above his conversation." To put them "in gull's coats and make them Jackpuddens in the Shakespeare dress is a sacrilege beyond anything in Spelman. The truth is," he goes on to say, "that this author's head was full of villainous and unnatural images, and history has only furnished him with great names." On the celebrated scene between Brutus and Cassius, he makes the following comment :-" They are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. They are to play a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reckoning."

Such were the opinions formed on the masterpieces of Shakespeare, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by a highly cultivated man who was well acquainted with the literatures of Greece, Rome, France, and modern Italy, whose name is honourably known in literature as the editor of the "Fœdera," and who has left a collection of poems which are by no means contemptible.

But not less extraordinary are the judgments of Voltaire on our great national poet. "Hamlet" he pronounces to be a piece so gross and barbarous that it would not be endured by the vilest of the population in France and Italy. Of that noble passage beginning, "Oh! that this too, too solid flesh would melt," he observes that a country bumpkin at a fair would express himself with more decency and in nobler language. With regard to the exquisite lines, "It faded on the crowing of the cock," &c., he can only express his surprise that Warburton could condescend to comment on such stuff. Dennis's "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspeare," though