of “our limits.”  A real reviewer always spends his first and best pages on the parts of a subject on which he wishes to write, the easy comfortable parts which he knows.  The formidable difficulties which he acknowledges, you foresee by a strange fatality that he will only reach two pages before the end; to his great grief, there is no opportunity for discussing them.  As a young gentleman at the India House examination wrote “Time up” on nine unfinished papers in succession, so you may occasionally read a whole review, in every article of which the principal difficulty of each successive question is about to be reached at the conclusion.  Nor can any one deny that this is the suitable skill, the judicious custom of the craft.

LORD ELDON

From ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’

As for Lord Eldon, it is the most difficult thing in the world to believe that there ever was such a man; it only shows how intense historical evidence is, that no one really doubts it.  He believed in everything which it is impossible to believe in,—­in the danger of Parliamentary Reform, the danger of Catholic Emancipation, the danger of altering the Court of Chancery, the danger of altering the courts of law, the danger of abolishing capital punishment for trivial thefts, the danger of making land-owners pay their debts, the danger of making anything more, the danger of making anything less.  It seems as if he maturely thought, “Now, I know the present state of things to be consistent with the existence of John Lord Eldon; but if we begin altering that state, I am sure I do not know that it will be consistent.”  As Sir Robert Walpole was against all committees of inquiry on the simple ground, “If they once begin that sort of thing, who knows who will be safe?” so that great Chancellor (still remembered in his own scene) looked pleasantly down from the woolsack, and seemed to observe, “Well, it is a queer thing that I should be here, and here I mean to stay.”

TASTE

From ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning’

There is a most formidable and estimable insane taste.  The will has great though indirect power over the taste, just as it has over the belief.  There are some horrid beliefs from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to which at first no effort can force it.  But if we fix the mind upon them, they have a power over us, just because of their natural offensiveness.  They are like the sight of human blood.  Experienced soldiers tell us that at first, men are sickened by the smell and newness of blood, almost to death and fainting; but that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they will bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood (at least for the moment) with a deep, eager love.  It is a principle that