Allen is the only one I have seen that
has made me seriously uneasy about the prospects of my literary
reputation.

I see Mr. Allen has been lately writing an article in the 'Fortnightly
Review' on the decay of criticism. Looking over it somewhat hurriedly,
my eye was arrested by the following:--

"Nowadays any man can write, because there are papers enough to give
employment to everybody. No reflection, no deliberation, no care; all is
haste, fatal facility, stock phrases, commonplace ideas, and a ready pen
that can turn itself to any task with equal ease, because supremely
ignorant of all alike."

. . . . . .

"The writer takes to his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for
literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He
has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever
possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing
confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to
a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to
subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious
ignorance, that strikes the keynote of our existing criticism. Men write
without taking the trouble to read or think."[377]

* * * * *

The 'Saturday Review' attacked 'Evolution, Old and New,' I may almost
say savagely. It wrote: "When Mr. Butler's 'Life and Habit' came before
us, we doubted whether his ambiguously expressed speculations belonged
to the regions of playful but possibly scientific imagination, or of
unscientific fancies; and we gave him the benefit of the doubt. In fact,
we strained a point or two to find a reasonable meaning for him. He has
now settled the question against himself. Not professing to have any
particular competence in biology, natural history, or the scientific
study of evidence in any shape whatever, and, indeed, rather glorying in
his freedom from any such superfluities, he undertakes to assure the
overwhelming majority of men of science, and the educated public who
have followed their lead, that, while they have done well to be
converted to the doctrine of the evolution and transmutation of species,
they have been converted on entirely wrong grounds."

. . . . . .

"When a writer who has not given as many weeks to the subject as Mr.
Darwin has given years [as a matter of fact, it is now twenty years
since I began to publish on the subject of Evolution] is no