erfully led by cries and shouts, and generally ready to take part
against any person who is either unwilling or unable to defend himself,
he deems it advisable not to be altogether quiet with those who assail
him. The best way to deal with vipers is to tear out their teeth; and
the best way to deal with pseudo-critics is to deprive them of their
poison-bag, which is easily done by exposing their ignorance. The writer
knew perfectly well the description of people with whom he would have to
do, he therefore very quietly prepared a stratagem, by means of which he
could at any time exhibit them, powerless and helpless, in his hand.
Critics, when they review books, ought to have a competent knowledge of
the subjects which those books discuss.

Lavengro is a philological book, a poem if you choose to call it so. Now,
what a fine triumph it would have been for those who wished to vilify the
book and its author, provided they could have detected the latter
tripping in his philology--they might have instantly said that he was an
ignorant pretender to philology--they laughed at the idea of his taking
up a viper by its tail, a trick which hundreds of country urchins do
every September, but they were silent about the really wonderful part of
the book, the philological matter--they thought philology was his
stronghold, and that it would be useless to attack him there; they of
course would give him no credit as a philologist, for anything like fair
treatment towards him was not to be expected at their hands, but they
were afraid to attack his philology--yet that was the point, and the only
point, in which they might have attacked him successfully; he was
vulnerable there. How was this? Why, in order to have an opportunity of
holding up pseudo-critics by the tails, he wilfully spelt various foreign
words wrong--Welsh words, and even Italian words--did they detect these
misspellings? not one of them, even as he knew they would not, and he now
taunts them with ignorance; and the power of taunting them with ignorance
is the punishment which he designed for them--a power which they might
but for their ignorance have used against him. The writer, besides
knowing something of Italian and Welsh, knows a little of Armenian
language and literature, but who knowing anything of the Armenian
language, unless he had an end in view, would say that the word for sea
in Armenian is anything like the word tide in English? The word for sea
in Arme