of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the
status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists.

I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses.
John Ruskin is a shining example to the contrary.

One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on
one important subject--that of poetry--as much of a bull in a china-shop
as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous
anecdote _a propos_ of Tennyson's publication of _The Idylls of the
King_--"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some
work"--and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how
absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may
be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English
literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats.
Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who,
according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely
permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist
of Chelsea and Ecclefechan.

A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of
English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to
be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than
Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King
Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject,
however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would
hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion.
But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a
distinction that has made him immortal.

He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness,
with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the
time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all
china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked
with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in
his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that
Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His
opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to
little--though they are far from being without their shrewd insight--and
much of the china--such as Milton's poetry--among which he gambolled,
after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china
he broke wa