I hope from the remarks I have previously made it will not be supposed that I think all criticism should be of a flat, neutral tint, or what may be called the washy order.  On the contrary, if criticism is not strong it cannot lift a young genius out of the struggling crowd, and it cannot beat down some bumptious impostor.  If the critic really believes that a new poet writes like Milton, or a new artist paints like Sir Joshua, let him say so; or if he thinks any work vile or contemptible, let him say so; but let him say so well.  Mere exaggerated language, as we have seen, is not strength; but if there is real strength 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:—­