amicably. 'This book,' says the critic, 'may be taken down to the
seaside, and lounged over not unprofitably;' or, 'Readers may do worse
than peruse this unpretending little volume of fugitive verse;' or
even, 'We hail this new aspirant to the laurels of Apollo.' But in the
thick of the publishing season, and when books pour into the reviewer
by the cartful, nothing can exceed the violence, and indeed sometimes
the virulence, of his language. That 'Now then, stoopid!' of the 'bus
conductor pales beside the lightnings of his scorn.

'Among the lovers of sensation, it is possible that some persons may
be found with tastes so utterly vitiated as to derive pleasure from
this monstrous production.' I cull these flowers of speech from a
wreath placed by a critic of the _Slasher_ on my own early brow. Ye
gods, how I hated him! How I pursued him with more than Corsican
vengeance; traduced him in public and private; and only when I had
thrust my knife (metaphorically) into his detested carcase, discovered
I had been attacking the wrong man. It is a lesson I have never
forgotten; and I pray you, my younger brothers of the pen, to lay it
to heart. Believe rather that your unfriendly critic, like the bee who
is fabled to sting and die, has perished after his attempt on your
reputation; and let the tomb be his asylum. For even supposing you get
the right sow by the ear--or rather, the wild boar with the 'raging
tooth'--what can it profit you? It is not like that difference of
opinion between yourself and twelve of your fellow-countrymen which
may have such fatal results. You are not an Adonis (except in outward
form, perhaps), that you can be ripped up with his tusk. His hard
words do not break your bones. If they are uncalled for, their
cruelty, believe me, can hurt only your vanity. While it is just
possible--though indeed in your case in the very highest degree
improbable--that the gentleman may have been right.

In the good old times we are told that a buffet from the hand of an
Edinburgh or Quarterly Reviewer would lay a young author dead at his
feet. If it was so, he must have been naturally very deficient in
vitality. It certainly did not kill Byron, though it was a knock-down
blow; he rose from that combat from earth, like Antaeus, all the
stronger for it. The story of its having killed Keats, though embalmed
in verse, is apocryphal; and if such blows were not fatal in those
times, still less so are they nowadays. On the o