e colours are cracked, or, upon reading Sterne, that he always wrote
"you was" instead of "you were." "Did it ever strike you," said a friend
of mine, "that whenever you hear of a young woman found drowned she
always is described as having worn elastic boots?" Such persons look at
all things through a distorting medium. Important things become
unimportant and _vice versa_. The foreground is thrust back, the
distance brought forward, and the middle distance is nowhere. The effect
of an exaggerated praise generally is that an unfair reaction sets in.
Mr. Justin M'Carthy, in his _History of Our Own Times_, points out how
much the character of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has suffered from the
absurd devotion of Kinglake. Kinglake writes (he says) of Lord Stratford
de Redcliffe "as if he were describing the all-compelling movements of
some divinity or providence." What nonsense has been talked about
Millais' landscapes, Whistler's nocturnes, Swinburne poetry--all
excellent enough in their way, and requiring to be praised according to
their merits, with a reserve as to their faults. The practice of puffing
tends to destroy all sort of proportion in criticism. When single
sentences or portions of sentences of apparently unqualified praise are
detached from context, and heaped together so as to induce the public to
think that all praise and no blame has been awarded, of course all
proportion is lost. Macaulay lashed this vice in his celebrated essay on
Robert Montgomery's poems. "We expect some reserve," he says, "some
decent pride in our hatter and our bootmaker. But no artifice by which
notoriety can be obtained is thought too abject for a man of letters.
Extreme poverty may indeed in some degree be an excuse for employing
these shifts as it may be an excuse for stealing a leg of mutton."

Upon the other hand, how unfair is exaggerated blame. I am not speaking
here of that which is intentionally unfair, but of blame fairly meant and
in some degree deserved, but where the language is out of all proportion
to the offence.

Ruskin so belaboured the poor ancients about their landscapes that when I
was a youth he had taught me to believe that Claude and Ruisdael were
mere duffers. So when he speaks of Whistler, as we shall presently see,
his blame is so exaggerated that it produces a revulsion in the mind of
the reader. He said Whistler's painting consisted in throwing a pot of
paint in the public's face. Well! we