Ah, my reader, don’t be too hard on Snarling; possibly you have yourself done something very like what he is doing now.  Forgive, as you need to be forgiven!  And try to attain that quite attainable temper in which you will read or listen to the most malignant attack upon you with curiosity and amusement, and with no angry feeling at all.  I suppose great people attain to this:  I mean cabinet-ministers and the like, who are daily flayed in print somewhere or other.  They come to take it all quite easily.  And if they were pure angels, somebody would attack them.  Most people, even those who differ from him, know, that, if this world has a humble, conscientious, pious man in it, that man is the present Archbishop of Canterbury:  yet last night I read in a certain powerful journal, that the great characteristics of that good man are cowardice, trickery, and simple rascality!  Honest Mr. Bumpkin, kind-hearted Miss Goodbody, do you fancy that you can escape?

Then we ought to try to fix it in our mind, that, in all matters into which taste enters at all, the most honest and the most able men may hopelessly, diametrically, differ:  original idiosyncrasy has so much to say here; and training has also so much.  One cultivated and honest man has an enthusiastic and most real love and enjoyment of Gothic architecture, and an absolute hatred for that of the classic revival; another man, equally cultivated and honest, has tastes which are the logical contradictory of these.  No one can doubt the ability of Byron, or of Sheridan; yet each of them thought very little of Shakspeare.  The question is, What suits you?  You may have the strongest conviction that you ought to like an author; you may be ashamed to confess that you don’t like him; and yet you may feel that you detest him.  For myself, I confess with shame, and I know the reason is in myself, I cannot for my life see anything to admire in the writings of Mr. Carlyle.  His style, both of thought and language, is to me insufferably irritating.  I tried to read the “Sartor Resartus,” and could not do it.  So if all people who have learned to read English were like me, Mr. Carlyle would have no readers.  Happily, the majority, in most cases, possesses the normal taste.  At least there is no further appeal than to the deliberate judgment of the majority of educated men.  I confess, further, that I would rather read Mr. Helps than Milton:  I do not say that I think Mr. Helps the greater man, but that I feel he suits me better.  I value the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” more highly than all the writings of Shelley put together.  It is a curious thing to read various reviews of the same book,—­particularly if it be one of those books which, if you like at all, you will like very much, and which, if you don’t like, you will absolutely hate.  It is curious to find opinions flatly contradictory of one another set forth in those reviews by very able, cultivated, and unprejudiced