critics never pretended they
were; they were merely showing how very good these poets could be, and
at the same time offering a delicate pleasure to the reader, who could
not complain that his digestion was overtaxed by the choice morsels. If
his pleasure in them prompted him to go to the entire poet quoted, in
the hope of rioting gluttonously upon him, the reader was rightly served
in one sense. In another, he was certainly not misserved or his time
wasted. It would be hard for him to prove that he could have employed it
more profitably.

Everybody, more or less, now sat up, and he who had the eye and ear of
the table went on to remark that he had not meant to make a defence of
the extinct school of quotational criticism. What he really meant to do
was to suggest a way out of the present situation in which the new
multitude of voracious readers were grossly feeding upon such
intellectual husks as swine would not eat, and imagining themselves
nourished by their fodder. There might be some person present who could
improve upon his suggestion, but his notion, as he conceived it, was
that something might be done in the line of quotational criticism to
restore the great poets to the public favor, for he understood that good
authors were now proportionately less read than they once were. He
thought that a pity: and the rest of the company joined in asking him
how he proposed to employ the quotational method for his purpose.

In answering he said that he would not go outside of the English
classics, and he would, for the present, deal only with the greatest of
these. He took it for granted that those listening were all agreed that
mankind would be advantaged in their minds or manners by a more or less
familiar acquaintance with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,
Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; he himself did not mind adding Scott to
the list, whose poetry he found much better than his prose. To bring
about an acquaintance which might very profitably ripen into intimacy,
he would have each of these poets treated in the whole measure of his
work as many or most of them had been topically or partially treated by
the quotational critics. Some one here made him observe that he was
laying out rather a large piece of work, and to this he answered, Not at
all; the work had been already done. Asked then, somewhat derisively,
why it need be done over again, he exp