ut Mr.
Morris's 'Earthly Paradise,' I heard a scornful voice exclaim, 'Oh!
give ME "Paradise Lost,"' and with that gentleman I _did_ have it out.
I promptly subjected him to cross-examination, and drove him to that
extremity that he was compelled to admit he had never read a word of
Milton for forty years, and even then only in extracts from 'Enfield's
Speaker.'

With Shakespeare--though there is a good deal of lying about _him_--the
case is different, and especially with elderly people; for 'in their
day,' as they pathetically term it, Shakespeare was played everywhere,
and everyone went to the play. They do not read him, but they recollect
him; they are well acquainted with his beauties--that is, with the
better known of them--and can quote him with manifest appreciation.
They are, intellectually, in a position much superior to that of a
fashionable lady of my acquaintance who informed me that her daughters
were going to the theatre that night to see Shakespeare's 'Turning of
the Screw.'

The writer who has done most, without I suppose intending it, to promote
hypocrisy in literature is Macaulay. His 'every schoolboy knows' has
frightened thousands into pretending to know authors with whom they have
not even a bowing acquaintance. It is amazing that a man who had read so
much should have written so contemptuously of those who have read but
little; one would have thought that the consciousness of superiority
would have forbidden such insolence, or that his reading would have been
extensive enough to teach him at least how little he had read of what
there was to read; since he read some things--works of imagination and
humour, for example--to such very little purpose, he might really have
bragged a little less. One feels quite grateful to Macaulay, however, for
avowing his belief that he was the only man who had read through the
'Faery Queen;' since that exonerates everybody--I do not say from reading
it, because the supposition is preposterous--but from the necessity of
pretending to have read it. The pleasure derived from that poem to most
minds is, I am convinced, analogous to that already spoken of as being
imparted by a foreign author: namely, the satisfaction at finding it--in
places--intelligible. For the few who possess the poetic faculty it has
great beauties, but I observe, from the extracts that appear in Poetic
Selections and the like, that the most tedious and even the most
monstrous passages are those wh