is hurtful and not
wholesome. The question is a delicate one. So many foolish persons are
rushing into print, that it requires a kind of literary police to hold
them back and keep them in order. Where there are mice there must be
cats, and where there are rats we may think it worth our while to keep
a terrier, who will give them a shake and let them drop, with all the
mischief taken out of them. But the process is a rude and cruel one at
best, and it too often breeds a love of destructiveness for its own sake
in those who get their living by it. A poor poem or essay does not do
much harm after all; nobody reads it who is like to be seriously hurt
by it. But a sharp criticism with a drop of witty venom in it stings a
young author almost to death, and makes an old one uncomfortable to no
purpose. If it were my business to sit in judgment on my neighbors,
I would try to be courteous, at least, to those who had done any good
service, but, above all, I would handle tenderly those young authors
who are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or early
appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright already.
Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina's
book of verses, I wish you would try this experiment.

Take half a sheet of paper and copy upon it any of Angelina's
stanzas,--the ones you were going to make fun of, if you will. Now go
to your window, if it is a still day, open it, and let the half-sheet
of paper drop on the outside. How gently it falls through the soft
air, always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to side,
wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as noiselessly as a
snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the earth! Just such would
have been the fate of poor Angelina's fluttering effort, if you had left
it to itself. It would have slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly
and softly that she would have never known when it reached that harmless
consummation.

Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from
its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes a book of criticisms. A Quarterly
Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the critic's
critic. A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic's
critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the
performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical
notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quar