amicably.  ‘This book,’ says the critic, ’may be taken down to the seaside, and lounged over not unprofitably;’ or, ’Readers may do worse than peruse this unpretending little volume of fugitive verse;’ or even, ‘We hail this new aspirant to the laurels of Apollo.’  But in the thick of the publishing season, and when books pour into the reviewer by the cartful, nothing can exceed the violence, and indeed sometimes the virulence, of his language.  That ‘Now then, stoopid!’ of the ’bus conductor pales beside the lightnings of his scorn.

’Among the lovers of sensation, it is possible that some persons may be found with tastes so utterly vitiated as to derive pleasure from this monstrous production.’  I cull these flowers of speech from a wreath placed by a critic of the Slasher on my own early brow.  Ye gods, how I hated him!  How I pursued him with more than Corsican vengeance; traduced him in public and private; and only when I had thrust my knife (metaphorically) into his detested carcase, discovered I had been attacking the wrong man.  It is a lesson I have never forgotten; and I pray you, my younger brothers of the pen, to lay it to heart.  Believe rather that your unfriendly critic, like the bee who is fabled to sting and die, has perished after his attempt on your reputation; and let the tomb be his asylum.  For even supposing you get the right sow by the ear—­or rather, the wild boar with the ’raging tooth’—­what can it profit you?  It is not like that difference of opinion between yourself and twelve of your fellow-countrymen which may have such fatal results.  You are not an Adonis (except in outward form, perhaps), that you can be ripped up with his tusk.  His hard words do not break your bones.  If they are uncalled for, their cruelty, believe me, can hurt only your vanity.  While it is just possible—­though indeed in your case in the very highest degree improbable—­that the gentleman may have been right.

In the good old times we are told that a buffet from the hand of an Edinburgh or Quarterly Reviewer would lay a young author dead at his feet.  If it was so, he must have been naturally very deficient in vitality.  It certainly did not kill Byron, though it was a knock-down blow; he rose from that combat from earth, like Antaeus, all the stronger for it.  The story of its having killed Keats, though embalmed in verse, is apocryphal; and if such blows were not fatal in those times, still less so are they nowadays.  On the other hand, if authors are difficult to slay, it is infinitely harder work to give them life by what the doctors term ’artificial respiration’—­puffing.  The amount of breath expended in the days of ‘the Quarterlies’ in this hopeless task would have moved windmills.  Not a single favourite of those critics—­selected, that is, from favouritism, and apart from merit—­now survives.  They failed even to obtain immortality for the writers in whom there was really something of genius, but whom they extolled beyond their deserts.  Their pet idol, for example, was Samuel Rogers.  And who reads Rogers’s poems now?  We remember something about them, and that is all; they are very literally ‘Pleasures of Memory.’