right to ask--we have a right to insist--that
undeserved reputations shall not be manufactured for us by any clique.
We have a right to protest when the offence is open and flagrant. Let
it be said, if it be not too late to say it, that Mr. Crockett, if left
alone by his indiscreet admirers, or only puffed within the limits of
the reasonable, might have been regarded as an honest workman as times
go, when everybody, more or less, writes fiction.

If his pages had come before me as the work of an unknown man, seeking
his proper place in the paper republic, it is certain that I could
have found some honest and agreeable things to say about him. But,
unfortunately, he, more than any other writer of his day, has been
signalled out for those uncostly extravagances of praise which are fast
discrediting us in our own eyes, and are making what should be the art
of criticism a mockery, and something of a shame. In what I have written
I have dealt less with his work than with the false estimate of it
which, for a year or two, has been thrust upon the public by a certain
band of writers who are either hopelessly incompetent to assess our
labours or incurably dishonest, It is very possible indeed that Mr.
Crockett is wholly undeserving of censure in this regard, that he has
not in any way asked or aided the manufacture of this balloon of a
reputation in which he has been floated to such heights. Apart from the
pretensions of his _claque_, there is no earthly reason why a critic
should hold him up to ridicule. It is not he who is ridiculous, but at
its best his position is respectable, and he holds his place (like the
mob of us who write for a living) for the moment only. To pretend that
he is a man of genius, to talk about him in the same breath with Sir
Walter Scott, to chronicle his comings and his goings as if he were
the embodiment of a new revelation, is to provoke a natural and just
resentment The more plainly that resentment is expressed--the more it
is seen that a false adulation is the seed of an open contempt--the
less likely writers of middling faculty will be to encourage a bloated
estimate of themselves.

[Since the above was written and printed Mr. Crockett has
published his story of 'Lads' Love,' the final chapter of
which is so good that in reading it I experienced a twinge
of regret for the onslaught I had made. But after all it is
not the author who is attacked in what goes before, and if