ects
or his excellences, that he equals Tennyson, and that Scott never wrote
anything finer. What is the justice of damning a meritorious novelist
by comparing him with Dickens, and smothering him with thoughtless and
good-natured eulogy? The poet and the novelist may be well enough,
and probably have qualities and gifts of their own which are worth the
critic's attention, if he has any time to bestow on them; and it is
certainly unjust to subject them to a comparison with somebody else,
merely because the critic will not take the trouble to ascertain what
they are. If, indeed, the poet and novelist are mere imitators of
a model and copyists of a style, they may be dismissed with such
commendation as we bestow upon the machines who pass their lives in
making bad copies of the pictures of the great painters. But the critics
of whom we speak do not intend depreciation, but eulogy, when they say
that the author they have in hand has the wit of Sydney Smith and the
brilliancy of Macaulay. Probably he is not like either of them, and may
have a genuine though modest virtue of his own; but these names
will certainly kill him, and he will never be anybody in the popular
estimation. The public finds out speedily that he is not Sydney Smith,
and it resents the extravagant claim for him as if he were an impudent
pretender. How many authors of fair ability to interest the world have
we known in our own day who have been thus sky-rocketed into notoriety
by the lazy indiscrimination of the critic-by-comparison, and then have
sunk into a popular contempt as undeserved! I never see a young aspirant
injudiciously compared to a great and resplendent name in literature,
but I feel like saying, My poor fellow, your days are few and full
of trouble; you begin life handicapped, and you cannot possibly run a
creditable race.

I think this sort of critical eulogy is more damaging even than that
which kills by a different assumption, and one which is equally common,
namely, that the author has not done what he probably never intended
to do. It is well known that most of the trouble in life comes from our
inability to compel other people to do what we think they ought, and it
is true in criticism that we are unwilling to take a book for what it
is, and credit the author with that. When the solemn critic, like a
mastiff with a ladies' bonnet in his mouth, gets hold of a light piece
of verse, or a graceful sketch which catches the humor of an hour