ength in the criticism, and it
is proportionate and appropriate, it will effect its purpose. It will
free the genius, or it will crush the humbug. A good critic should be
feared:

"Good Lord, I wouldn't have that man
Attack me in the _Times_,"

was said of Jacob Omnium.

"Yes, I am proud, I own it, when I see
Men not afraid of God afraid of me,"

Pope said, and I can fancy with what a stern joy an honest critic would
arise and slay what he believed to be false and vicious. In no time was
the need of strong criticism greater than it is at present. The press is
teeming with rubbish and something worse. Everybody reads anything that
is published with sufficient flourish and advertisement, and those who
read have mostly no power of judging for themselves, nor would they be
turned from the garbage which seems to delight them by any gentle
persuasion. It is therefore most necessary that the critic should speak
out plainly and boldly, though with temper and discretion. I suppose we
have all of us read Lord Macaulay's criticism upon Robert Montgomery's
poems. The poems are, of course, forgotten; but the essay still lives as
a specimen of the terribly slashing style. This is the way one couplet
is dealt with--

"The soul aspiring pants its source to mount,
As streams meander level with their fount."

"We take this on the whole to be the worst similitude in the world. In
the first place, no stream meanders, or can possibly meander, level with
its fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their
founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of
meandering level and that of mounting upwards. After saying that
lightning is designless and self-created, he says, a few lines further
on, that it is the Deity who bids

'the thunder rattle from the skiey deep.'

His theory is therefore this, that God made the thunder but the lightning
made itself." Of course, poor Robert Montgomery was crushed flat, and
rightly. Yet before this essay was written his poems had a larger
circulation than Southey or Coleridge, just as in our own time Martin
Tupper had a larger sale than Tennyson or Browning. Fancy if Tupper had
been treated in the same vein how the following lines would have fared:--

"Weep, relentless eye of Nature,
Drop some pity on the soil,
Every plant and every creature
Droops and faints in dusty toil."

What do the plants toil at?