The worst, “fulfyld with malace of froward entente,” would choose for theme not the work but the worker, upon the good old principle “Abuse the plaintiff’s attorney.”  These arts fully account for the downfall of criticism in our day and the deafness of the public to such literary verdicts.  But a few years ago a favourable review in a first-rate paper was “fifty pounds in the author’s pocket”:  now it is not worth as many pence unless signed by some well-known scribbling statesman or bustling reverend who caters for the public taste.  The decline and fall is well expressed in the old lines:—­

     “Non est sanctior quod laudaris: 
     Non est vilior si vituperaris.”

“No one, now-a-days, cares for reviews,” wrote Darwin as far back as 1849; and it is easy to see the whys and the wherefores.  I have already touched upon the duty of reviewing the reviewer when the latter’s work calls for the process, despite the pretensions of modern criticism that it must not be criticised.  Although to buffet an anonym is to beat the air, still the very effort does good.  A well-known and popular novelist of the present day was a favourite butt for certain journalists who, with the normal half-knowledge of men—­

     “That read too little, and that write too much”—­

persistently fell foul of the points in which the author was almost always right and the reviewer was wrong.  “An eagle hawketh not at flies;” the object of ill-natured satire despised—­

     “The creatures of the stall and stye,”

and persisted in contemptuous reticence, giving consent by silence to what was easily refuted, and suffering a fond and foolish sentence to misguide the public which it pretends to direct.  “Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment,” is a wise saying when silently practiced; it leads, however, to suffering in public esteem.  The case in question was wholly changed when, at my suggestion, the writer was persuaded to catch a few of the culprits and to administer the dressing and redressing they so richly deserved.

And now to my tale.

Mr. Henry Reeve, Editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote to me shortly before my first volume was issued to subscribers (September,’85) asking for advance sheets, as his magazine proposed to produce a general notice of The Arabian Nights Entertainments.  But I suspected the man whose indiscretion and recklessness had been so unpleasantly paraded in the shape of the Greville (Mr. Worldly Wiseman’s) Memoirs, and I had not forgotten the untruthful and malignant articles of perfervid brutality which during the hot youth and calm middle age of the Edinburgh had disgraced the profession of letters.  My answer, which was temporising and diplomatic, induced only a second and a more urgent application.  Bearing in mind that professional etiquette hardly justifies publicly reviewing a book intended only for private reading and vividly remembering the evil of the periodical, I replied that the sheets