t being Vealy. It may be dull, stupid, illogical,
and the like, and yet have nothing of boyishness about it. It may be
insufferably bad, yet quite mature. Beef may be bad, and yet undoubtedly
Beef. And the question now is, not so much whether there be a standard
of what is in a literary sense good or bad, as whether there be a
standard of what is Veal and what is Beef. And there is a great
difficulty here. Is a thing to be regarded as mature, when it suits your
present taste, when it is approved by your present deliberate judgment?
For your taste is always changing: your standard is not the same for
three successive years of your early youth. The Veal you now despise you
thought Beef when you wrote it. And so, too, with the productions of
other men. You cannot read now without amazement the books which used
to enchant you as a child. I remember when I used to read Hervey's
"Meditations" with great delight. That was when I was about five years
old. A year or two later I greatly affected Macpherson's translation of
Ossian. It is not so very long since I felt the liveliest interest in
Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." Let me confess that I retain a kindly
feeling towards it yet; and that I am glad to see that some hundreds
of thousands of readers appear to be still in the stage out of which I
passed some years since. Yes, as you grow older, your taste changes: it
becomes more fastidious; and especially you come to have always less
toleration for sentimental feeling and for flights of fancy. And besides
this gradual and constant progression, which holds on uniformly year
after year, there are changes in mood and taste sometimes from day to
day and from hour to hour. The man who did a very silly thing thought
it was a wise thing when he did it. He sees the matter differently in a
little while. On the evening after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of
Wellington wrote a certain letter. History does not record its matter or
style. But history does record, that some years afterwards the Duke paid
a hundred guineas to get it back again,--and that, on getting it, he
instantly burned it, exclaiming, that, when he wrote it, he must have
been the greatest idiot on the face of the earth. Doubtless, if we had
seen that letter, we should have heartily coincided in the sentiment of
the hero. He _was_ an idiot when he wrote it, but he did not think that
he was one. I think, however, that there is a standard of sense and
folly, and that ther