nineteenth century, but it is an infinitely better book than
_Rasselas_, which has the single advantage that it is shorter. And so
one might go on through the list of great men of letters from
Johnson's to our own day. Burke, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Macaulay, Carlyle, Thackeray, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne,
Pater, Meredith, Stevenson--I choose more or less at a hazard a list
of imaginative writers who are in the very mid-stream of English
criticism. Even in our own day, how many of the poets and novelists
have graduated as critics! What lover of Mr Henry James is there who
would not almost be willing to sacrifice one of his novels rather than
his _Partial Portraits_? Who is there, even among Mr Bernard Shaw's
detractors, who would wish his dramatic criticisms unwritten? And who
would not exchange a great deal of Mr George Moore's fiction for
another book like _Impressions and Opinions_? Similarly, Mr W. B.
Yeats has revealed his genius in a book of criticism like _Ideas of
Good and Evil_ no less than in a book of verse like _The Wind among
the Reeds_; Mr William Watson's works include a volume of _Excursions
in Criticism_; Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has published two volumes of
critical causeries; Mr Max Beerbohm is no less distinguished as a
critic than as a caricaturist; "A. E." reviews books in _The Irish
Times_, and Mr Walter De la Mare in _The Westminster Gazette_. Here
surely is a list that may suggest a doubt in the minds of those who
take the view that the critics are merely a mob of embittered hacks
who have failed at everything else. This is one of those traditional
fallacies, like the stage Irishman, which men accept apparently for
the sake of ease. Even the most superficial enquiries at the offices
of the newspapers and the weekly reviews would reveal the fact that a
great percentage of the best poets and novelists either are engaged,
or have been engaged in their green and generous days, in the work of
criticism. If Shakespeare were alive to-day he would probably earn his
living at first, not by holding horses' heads, but by turning dramatic
critic. Every artist worth his salt has in him the makings of a
journalist. Milton himself was as ferocious a pamphleteer as any of
those blood-and-thunder rectors whom we see quoted by "Sub Rosa" in
_The Daily News_. Tolstoy was as furiously active, if not so furiously
bitter, a journalist. And who is the most charming and graceful
journalist and critic of our