which I have used the term, such criticism is not _bona fide_.
Well may Mr. Matthew Arnold say, speaking of Mr. Ruskin's criticism upon
another subject, that he forgets all moderation and proportion, and loses
the balance of his mind. This, he says, "is to show in one's criticism
to the highest excess the note of provinciality."

There was, once upon a time, a very strong Court of Appeal. It was
universally acknowledged to be so, and the memory of it still remains,
and very old lawyers still love to recall its glories. It was composed
of Lord Chancellor Campbell and the Lords Justices Knight-Bruce and
Turner. Bethell (afterwards Lord Westbury) was an ambitious and aspiring
man, and was always most caustic in his criticisms. He had been arguing
before the above Court one day, and upon his turning round after
finishing his argument, some counsel in the row behind him asked, "Well,
Bethell, how will their judgment go?" Bethell replied, in his softest
but most cutting tones, "I do not know. Knight-Bruce is a jack-pudding.
Turner is an old woman. And no human being can by any possibility
predict what will fall from the lips of that inexpressibly fatuous
individual who sits in the middle." This is funny, but it is vulgar, and
it is not given in good faith. It is the offspring of anger and spite
mixed with a desire to be clever and antithetical.

I gather from Mr. Matthew Arnold's essays on criticism that the endeavour
of the critic should be to see the object criticized "as in itself it
really is," or as in another passage he says, "Real criticism obeys an
instinct prompting it to know the best that is known and thought in the
world." "In order to do or to be this, criticism," he says, in italics,
"ought to be _disinterested_." He points out how much English criticism
is not disinterested. He says, "We have the _Edinburgh Review_, existing
as an organ of the old Whigs, and for as much play of mind as may suit
its being _that_; we have the _Quarterly Review_, existing as an organ of
the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we
have the _British Quarterly Review_, existing as an organ of the
political Dissenters, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being
that; we have the _Times_ existing as an organ of the common satisfied
well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being
that. . . . Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to
forget the