He has altered, however, since Sheridan’s time in his method of proceeding.  He does not say, ’There is a very unpleasant notice of you in the Scorpion, my dear fellow, which I deplore.’  The scoundrel now affects a more light-hearted style.  ’There is a review of your last book in the Scorpion’, he says, ’which will amuse you.  It is very malicious, and evidently the offspring of personal spite, but it is very clever.’  Then you go down to your club, and take the thing up with the tongs, when nobody is looking, and make yourself very miserable; or you buy it, going home in the cab, and, having spoilt your appetite for dinner with it, tear it up very small, throw it out of window, and swear you have never seen it.

One forgives the critic—­perhaps—­but never the good-natured friend.  It is always possible—­to the wise man—­to refrain from reading the lucubration of the former, but he cannot avoid the latter:  which brings me to the main subject of this paper—­the Critic on the Hearth.  One can be deaf to the voice of the public hireling, but it is impossible to shut one’s ears to the private communications of one’s friends and family—­all meant for our good, no doubt, but which are nevertheless insufferable.

In Miss Martineau’s Autobiography there is a passage expressing her surprise that whereas in all other cases there is a certain modest reticence in respect to other people’s business when it is of a special kind, the profession of literature is made an exception.  As there is no one but imagines that he can poke a fire and drive a gig, so everyone believes he can write a book, or at all events (like that blasphemous person in connection with the Creation) that he can give a wrinkle or two to the author.

I wonder what a parson would say, if a man who never goes to church save when his babies are christened, or by accident to get out of a shower, should volunteer his advice about sermon-making? or an artist, to whom the man without arms, who is wheeled about in the streets for coppers, should recommend a greater delicacy of touch?  Indeed, metaphor fails me, and I gasp for mere breath when I think of the astounding impudence of some people.  If I possessed a tithe of it, I should surely have made my fortune by this time, and be in the enjoyment of the greatest prosperity.  It must be remembered, too, that the opinion of the Critics on the Hearth is always volunteered (indeed, one would as soon think of asking for it as for a loan from the Sultan of Turkey), and in nine cases out of ten it is unfavourable.  One has no objection to their praise, nor to any amount of it; what is so abhorrent is their advice, and still more their disapproval.  It is like throwing ’half a brick’ at you, which, utterly valueless in itself, still hurts you when it hits you.  And the worst of it is that, apart from their rubbishy opinions, one likes these people; they are one’s friends and relatives, and to cut one’s moorings from them altogether would be to sail over the sea of life without a port to touch at.