XXXV
There are certain writers—men, too, of ability, humour, perspicacity, with wide knowledge, lucidity of expression, firm intellectual grip, genuine admirations, who really live among the things of the mind—whose writings are almost wholly distressing to me, and affect me exactly as the cry of an itinerant vendor in a quiet and picturesque town affects me. It is an honest trade enough; he saves people a great deal of trouble; he sells, no doubt, perfectly wholesome and inexpensive things; but I am glad when he has turned the corner, and when his raucous clamour is heard more faintly—glad when he is out of sight, and still more when he is out of hearing. So with these authors; if I take up one of their books, however brilliant and even true the statements may be, I am sorry that the writer has laid hands upon a thing I admire and value. He seems like a damp-handed auctioneer, bawling in public, and pointing out the beauties of a mute and pathetic statue.
I am thinking now of one writer in particular, a well-known man of letters, a critic, essayist, and biographer; a man of great acuteness and with strong and vehement preferences in literature. When I have been forced by circumstances, as I sometimes have, to read one of his books, I find myself at once in a condition of irritable opposition. He writes sensibly, acutely, epigrammatically; but there is a vile complacency about it all, an underlying assumption that every one who does not agree with him in the smallest particular