r, whether after "the beautiful," or after "fame,"
or after the means of paying butchers' bills, and accepting it as a
necessary evil which must be committed, to see that it be committed as
well, or at least a little ill, as possible. In excuse of which we may
quote Mr. Carlyle against himself, reminding him of a saying in Goethe
once bepraised by him in print,--"we must take care of the beautiful for
the useful will take care of itself."

And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his _Dunciad_, did the beautiful
require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care of
itself, and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care of it
evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this present
time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's poem is to be taken as a
fair expression of "the public taste."

Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the object
of our reproaches: but Mr. Smith's models and flatterers. Against him we
have nothing whatever to say; for him, very much indeed....

What if he has often copied.... He does not more than all schools have
done, copy their own masters.... We by no means agree in the modern
outcry for "originality." ...

As for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his models, out-Herod
Herod. But why not? If Herod be a worthy king, let him be by all means
out-Heroded, if any man can do it. One cannot have too much of a good
thing. If it be right to bedizen verses with metaphors and similes which
have no reference, either in tone or in subject, to the matter in hand,
let there be as many of them as possible. If a saddle is a proper place
for jewels, then let the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and
Runjeet Singh's harness maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose
barbaric splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear
pigskin and severe simplicity--not to say utility, and comfort. If
poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us
have it as poetical as possible, as unlike English: as ungrammatical,
abrupt, insolved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or
caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by
writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphyric, and then
trying to explain them by concrete concetti; which bear an entirely
accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to
illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as pos