as people say, is that it may
come to be taken for the thing it resembles, as a wavering
image in water resembles the rock which it reflects.

Obviously, here in America we have a sympathetic tolerance for the
"second-rate." But such tolerance is not without its excuse. The fault
of the uncritical element in many of the book notices which appear in
American newspapers and magazines lies to a large extent at the door
of the author who gives us material which humiliates and silences
criticism, although a certain expository attention must be given for
the very fact that the book invariably has a public awaiting it. For
such gratuitous attention the author should be grateful. At least his
public is not misled.

Literary criticism is a distinct department of literature, with its
functions and limits as clearly defined as are those of any of the
creative departments,--history, biography, fiction. It presupposes on
the part of the writer the possession of a knowledge of permanent
literature, of the rules of literary construction, of trained taste in
selecting models, and of a quick imagination capable of perceiving
pertinent comparisons and setting forth vivid impressions. Writers
like Lessing, Victor Cousin, Matthew Arnold, and Jules Lemaitre have
exercised in criticism a system which is quite as capable of
exposition and analysis as that of the historian, the poet, or the
novelist. In America this system has also done its best, without
entirely prostituting its art, to meet the exigencies and claims of
pseudo-literary production and its sympathetic, impressionable public.

Until within quite recent years there were only two acknowledged
schools of criticism: the scientific and the classical. The former
gauged the work to be criticised by rule and measure; the latter
compared it with models which had long been established as criterions
of good taste. Then came the impressionistic school, in which the
critic, while not unmindful of accepted and approved rules of
construction and expression or of classical paradigms, allowed the
author more license, more individuality, and permitted himself the
same freedom in noting a thing good, bad, or indifferent, because it
so appealed to his personal taste at the time of perusal and quite
independent of what had gone before. This impressionistic criticism is
essentially a personal view, and without it very few current books
could be considered critically at all.

Now of th