a certain portion of the Gospels had been given away by Mr. John
Morley on a certain occasion. Our great Mr. John Morley was then only
known to a select few. The general public would perfectly understand who
was the Mr. John Morley to whom I referred. The reviewer who deprecated
my book, briefly, as somewhat gloomy--it had not become the fashion then
to expose the sores of City life--sneeringly observed that it would be
interesting if I would state what were the portions of the Gospels given
away by Mr. John Morley, evidently ignorant that there could be any John
Morley besides the one he knew. I do not for a moment suppose that the
reviewer had any personal pique towards myself. His blunder was simply
one of ignorance. In another case it seemed to me that the reviewer of a
critical journal which had no circulation had simply made his review a
ground of attack against a weekly paper of far greater circulation and
authority than his own. I had published a little sketch of travel in
Canada. The review of it was long and wearisome. I could not understand
it till I read in the closing sentence that there was no reason why the
book should have been reprinted from the obscure journal in which it
originally appeared--that obscure journal at the time being, as it is to
this day, one of the most successful of all our weeklies. In his case
the _motif_ of the ill-natured criticism was very obvious.

In some cases one can only impute a review of an unfavourable character
to what the Americans call "pure cussedness." For instance, I had
written a book called "British Senators," of which _The Pall Mall
Gazette_ had spoken in the highest terms. It fell into the hands of the
_Saturday_ reviewer when _The Saturday Review_ was in its palmy days,
always piquant and never dull. It was a fine opportunity for the
reviewer, and he wielded his tomahawk with all the vigour of the Red
Indian. I was an unknown man with no friends. It was a grand
opportunity, though he was kind enough to admit that I was a literary
gent of the Sala and Edmund Yates type (it was the time when George
Augustus Sala was at the bottom--the _Saturday_ took to praising him when
he had won his position), a favourable specimen if I remember aright. So
far so good, but the aim of the superfine reviewer was of course to make
"the literary gent" look like a fool. As an illustration of the way in
which we all contract our ideas from living in a little world of