(Mrs Forster) as his critical letters usually are—­we find three noteworthy criticisms on contemporaries, all tinged with that slight want of cordial appreciation which characterises his criticism of this kind throughout (except, perhaps, in the case of Browning).  The first is on Alexander Smith—­it was the time of the undue ascension of the Life-Drama rocket before its equally undue fall.  “It can do me no good [an odd phrase] to be irritated with that young man, who certainly has an extraordinary faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a very dubious character.”  The second, harsher but more definite, is on Villette.  “Why is Villette disagreeable?  Because the writer’s mind [it is worth remembering that he had met Charlotte Bronte at Miss Martineau’s] contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can in fact put into her book.  No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long-run.”  The Fates were kinder:  and Miss Bronte’s mind did contain something besides these ugly things.  But it was her special weakness that her own thoughts and experiences were insufficiently mingled and tempered by a wider knowledge of life and literature.  The third is on My Novel, which he says he has “read with great pleasure, though Bulwer’s nature is by no means a perfect one either, which makes itself felt in his book; but his gush, his better humour, his abundant materials, and his mellowed constructive skill—­all these are great things.”  One would give many pages of the Letters for that naif admission that “gush” is “a great thing.”

A little later (May 1853), all his spare time is being spent on a poem, which he thinks by far the best thing he has yet done, to wit, Sohrab and Rustum.  And he “never felt so sure of himself or so really and truly at ease as to criticism.”  He stays in barracks at the depot of the 17th Lancers with a brother-in-law, and we regret to find that “Death or Glory” manners do not please him.  The instance is a cornet spinning his rings on the table after dinner.  “College does civilise a boy,” he ejaculates, which is true—­always providing that it is a good college.  Yet, with that almost unconscious naturalness which is particularly noticeable in him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford—­thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since his days.  Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters’ sons (it is just at the time of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable.  He sees a good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere about the same time that “of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages, that of middle-class Dissent is the stupidest.”  It is sad to find that he thinks women utterly unfit for teachers and lecturers; but Girton and Lady Margaret’s may take comfort, it is “no natural incapacity, but the fault of their bringing-up.”  With regard to his second series of Poems (v. infra) he thinks Balder will “consolidate the peculiar sort of reputation he got by Sohrab and Rustum;” and a little later, in April 1856, we have his own opinion of himself as a poet, whose charm is “literalness and simplicity.”  Mr Ruskin is also treated—­with less appreciation than one could wish.