“What’s the good of calling a woman a Wenus, Samivel?” asked the elder Weller.  What indeed!  The elder Weller probably perceived that the language would be out of all proportion to the object of Samivel’s affections.  Of course, something may be allowed to a generous enthusiasm, and, with regard to this fault in criticism, it should perhaps be said that exaggerated praise is not so base in its beginning or so harmful in the end as exaggerated blame.  From the use of the former Dr. Johnson defended himself with his usual vigour.  Boswell presumed to find fault with him for saying that the death of Garrick had eclipsed the gaiety of nations.  Johnson:  “I could not have said more, nor less.  It is the truth.  His death did eclipse, it was like a storm.”  Boswell:  “But why nations?  Did his gaiety extend further than his own nation?” Johnson:  “Why, sir, some exaggeration must be allowed.  Besides, ‘nations’ may be said—­if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety,—­which they have not.”

But there is more in this matter of proportion than at first meets the eye.  How often do we converse with a man whose language we wonder at and cannot quite make out.  It is somehow unsatisfactory.  We do not quite like it, yet there is nothing particular to dislike.  Suddenly we perceive that there is a want of perspective, or perhaps a want of what artists call value.  His mountains are mole-hills, and his mole-hills are mountains.  His colouring is so badly managed that the effect of distance, light, and shade are lost.  Thus a man will so insist upon the use of difficult words by George Elliot that a person unacquainted with her writings would think that the whole merit or demerit of that author lay in her vocabulary.  A man will so exalt the pathos of Dickens or Thackeray that he will throw their wit and humour into the background.  Some person’s only remark on seeing Turner’s Modern Italy will be that the colours are cracked, or, upon reading Sterne, that he always wrote “you was” instead of “you were.”  “Did it ever strike you,” said a friend of mine, “that whenever you hear of a young woman found drowned she always is described as having worn elastic boots?” Such persons look at all things through a distorting medium.  Important things become unimportant and vice versa.  The foreground is thrust back, the distance brought forward, and the middle distance is nowhere.  The effect of an exaggerated praise generally is that an unfair reaction sets in.  Mr. Justin M’Carthy, in his History of Our Own Times, points out how much the character of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has suffered from the absurd devotion of Kinglake.  Kinglake writes (he says) of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe “as if he were describing the all-compelling movements of some divinity or providence.”  What nonsense has been talked about Millais’ landscapes, Whistler’s nocturnes, Swinburne poetry—­all excellent enough in their way, and requiring to be