compared somewhere to "brushers of noblemen's clothes." In
an honest world, however, one might brush a nobleman's clothes not out
of servility, but out of tidiness. There would have been nothing
degrading in it if Queen Elizabeth herself had ironed the stains out
of Shakespeare's doublet, provided she had done it from decent
motives. Critics of the better sort need not worry when their service
is misconstrued as servitude. Those who attack them are usually men
who are under the delusion that it is better to be a bad artist than a
good critic. Thus we find the author of _Lanky Bill and His Dog
Bluebeard_ looking down with patronage on a man like Hazlitt, because
he lacked something that is called the creative gift. Even the life
and work of Walter Pater have not succeeded in dispelling the popular
notion that the imagination is more honourably employed in inventing
sentences for sawdust figures than in relating the experiences of
one's own soul. According to this standard, Mr Charles Garvice must be
ranked higher among imaginative authors than Sir Thomas Browne, and
the _Essays of Elia_ must give place to the novels of Mrs Florence
Barclay. Clearly no line can be drawn on principles of this kind
between imaginative and unimaginative literature. The artists, for the
most part, are as lacking in imagination as the critics. They have
merely chosen a more luxurious form of writing. Oscar Wilde used to
say that anybody could make history, but only a man of genius could
write it; and one might contend in the same way that nearly anybody
can make literature, but only a clever man can criticise it. The
genius of the critic is as much an original gift as the genius of a
runner or a composer.

One need not go back further than Dryden to realise to what an extent
the successful artists have thrown themselves into the work of
criticism. Most of us nowadays find Dryden's prefaces and his _Essay
on Dramatic Poesy_ easier reading than his verse; and, in the age that
followed, criticism seems to have come as naturally to the men of
letters as conversation. Addison, commonplace critic though he was,
was always airing his views on poetry and music; and what is Pope's
_Dunciad_ but a comic epic of criticism? Nor was Dr Johnson less
concerned with thumping the cushion in the matter of literature than
in the matter of morals. His _Lives of the Poets_ does not seem a
great book to us who have been brought up on the romantic criticism
of the