And that leads me to say, I cannot help thinking that the kind of criticism to which this Young Girl has been subjected from some person or other, who is willing to be smart at her expense, is hurtful and not wholesome.  The question is a delicate one.  So many foolish persons are rushing into print, that it requires a kind of literary police to hold them back and keep them in order.  Where there are mice there must be cats, and where there are rats we may think it worth our while to keep a terrier, who will give them a shake and let them drop, with all the mischief taken out of them.  But the process is a rude and cruel one at best, and it too often breeds a love of destructiveness for its own sake in those who get their living by it.  A poor poem or essay does not do much harm after all; nobody reads it who is like to be seriously hurt by it.  But a sharp criticism with a drop of witty venom in it stings a young author almost to death, and makes an old one uncomfortable to no purpose.  If it were my business to sit in judgment on my neighbors, I would try to be courteous, at least, to those who had done any good service, but, above all, I would handle tenderly those young authors who are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or early appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright already.  Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina’s book of verses, I wish you would try this experiment.

Take half a sheet of paper and copy upon it any of Angelina’s stanzas,—­the ones you were going to make fun of, if you will.  Now go to your window, if it is a still day, open it, and let the half-sheet of paper drop on the outside.  How gently it falls through the soft air, always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to side, wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as noiselessly as a snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the earth!  Just such would have been the fate of poor Angelina’s fluttering effort, if you had left it to itself.  It would have slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly and softly that she would have never known when it reached that harmless consummation.

Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from its ad infinitum progeny.  A man writes a book of criticisms.  A Quarterly Review criticises the critic.  A Monthly Magazine takes up the critic’s critic.  A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic’s critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the critical work we started with.  And thus we see that as each flea “has smaller fleas that on him prey,” even the critic himself cannot escape the common lot of being bitten.  Whether all this is a blessing or a curse, like that one which made Pharaoh and all his household run to their toilet-tables, is a question about which opinions might differ.  The physiologists of the time of Moses—­if there were vivisectors other than priests in those days—­would probably have considered that other plague, of the frogs, as a fortunate opportunity for science, as this poor little beast has been the souffre-douleur of experimenters and schoolboys from time immemorial.