If we cannot classify men scientifically and reduce them under a kind of botanical order, as if they had a calculable vegetable development, neither can we gain much knowledge of them by comparison.  It does not help me at all in my estimate of their characters to compare Mandeville with the Young Lady, or Our Next Door with the Parson.  The wise man does not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparison of his friends.  His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many qualities.  When Mandeville goes into my garden in June I can usually find him in a particular bed of strawberries, but he does not speak disrespectfully of the others.  When Nature, says Mandeville, consents to put herself into any sort of strawberry, I have no criticisms to make, I am only glad that I have been created into the same world with such a delicious manifestation of the Divine favor.  If I left Mandeville alone in the garden long enough, I have no doubt he would impartially make an end of the fruit of all the beds, for his capacity in this direction is as all-embracing as it is in the matter of friendships.  The Young Lady has also her favorite patch of berries.  And the Parson, I am sorry to say, prefers to have them picked for him the elect of the garden—­and served in an orthodox manner.  The straw-berry has a sort of poetical precedence, and I presume that no fruit is jealous of it any more than any flower is jealous of the rose; but I remark the facility with which liking for it is transferred to the raspberry, and from the raspberry (not to make a tedious enumeration) to the melon, and from the melon to the grape, and the grape to the pear, and the pear to the apple.  And we do not mar our enjoyment of each by comparisons.

Of course it would be a dull world if we could not criticise our friends, but the most unprofitable and unsatisfactory criticism is that by comparison.  Criticism is not necessarily uncharitableness, but a wholesome exercise of our powers of analysis and discrimination.  It is, however, a very idle exercise, leading to no results when we set the qualities of one over against the qualities of another, and disparage by contrast and not by independent judgment.  And this method of procedure creates jealousies and heart-burnings innumerable.

Criticism by comparison is the refuge of incapables, and especially is this true in literature.  It is a lazy way of disposing of a young poet to bluntly declare, without any sort of discrimination of his defects or his excellences, that he equals Tennyson, and that Scott never wrote anything finer.  What is the justice of damning a meritorious novelist by comparing him with Dickens, and smothering him with thoughtless and good-natured eulogy?  The poet and the novelist may be well enough, and probably have qualities and gifts of their own which are worth the critic’s attention, if he has any time to bestow on them; and it is certainly unjust to subject