SOURCE: A review of Altiora Peto, in The Spectator, Vol. 56, No. 2881, September 15, 1883, pp. 1190-91.

In the following review, the anonymous critic praises Altiora Peto as a "brilliant picture of life and manners. '

A writer in the last number of the Quarterly Review expresses tart dissatisfaction with the present state of criticism in England. It has fallen, he asserts, for the most part, into the hands of novices and pen-weary hacks, and they manage things much better in France. They manage things very differently in France, for literary criticism is practised there under conditions which differ toto coelo from those which obtain in England. Nine-tenths of the books which are reviewed in England are marked by mediocrity which would ensure exemption from criticism of any kind in France. Now, of all books, the hardest to review at all well, are the books which bring the critic's work, willy-nilly...