e been frequently criticised,
and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's
life. Most men endure criticism with commendable fortitude, just as most
criminals when under the drop conduct themselves with calmness. They
bleed, but they bleed inwardly. To be flayed in the _Saturday Review_,
for instance,--a whole amused public looking on,--is far from pleasant;
and, after the operation, the ordinary annoyances of life probably
magnify themselves into tortures. The grasshopper becomes a burden.
Touch a flayed man ever so lightly, and with ever so kindly an intention,
and he is sure to wince. The skin of the man of letters is peculiarly
sensitive to the bite of the critical mosquito; and he lives in a climate
in which such mosquitoes swarm. He is seldom stabbed to the heart--he is
often killed by pin-pricks.

But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to the interior of the
citadel, it may be said that great writers, although they must ever
remain shining objects of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinary
limitations and conditions. They are cabined, cribbed, confined, even as
their more prosaic brethren. It is in the nature of every man to be
endued with that he works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchant
becomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavour
of the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine and
horse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul--his experiences are docketed
in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away in
professional pigeon-holes. A man naturally becomes leavened by the
profession which he has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams "shop,"
as the colloquial phrase has it. Men of letters are affected by their
profession just as merchants, physicians, and lawyers are. In course of
time the inner man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper. The
agriculturist talks constantly of bullocks--the man of letters constantly
of books. The printing-press seems constantly in his immediate
neighbourhood. He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourable
review,--he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition. The narrowing
effect of a profession is in every man a defect, albeit an inevitable
one. Byron, who had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of his
day, tells us, in "Beppo,"

"One hates an author that's _all author_; fellows
In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink."

And his lordship's "hat