one
over-sensitive Keats--this monarchic We is but a frail mortal, liable at
least to "some of the imperfections of our common nature, gentlemen,"
as, for example, to be morose, impatient, splenetic, and the more if
over-worked. Neither should I waive in this place, in this my rostrum of
blunt, plain speech, the many censurable cases, unhappily too well
authenticated, where personal enmity has envenomed the reviewing pen
against a writer, and stabs in the dark have wounded good men's fame.
Neither, again, those other instances where reviewers, not being
omniscient, (yet is their knowledge most various and brilliant,) having
been from want of specific information incompetent to judge of the
matters in question, have striven to shroud their ignorance of the
greater topic in clamorous attacks of its minor incidents; burrowing
into a mound if they cannot force a breach through the rampart; and
mystifying things so cleverly with doubts, that we cannot see the
blessed sun himself for very fog.

Now really, good folk, all this should be amended: would that the
WE were actually plural; would that we had a well-selected
bench of literary judges; would that some higher sort of Stationers'
Hall or Athenaeum were erected into an acknowledged tribunal of an
author's merits or demerits; would that, to wish the very least, the
wholesome practice of a well-considered imprimatur were revived! Let
famous men, whose reputation is firm-fixed--our Wordsworths, Hallams,
Campbells, Crolys, Wilsons, Bulwers, and the like--decide in the case of
at least all who desire such decision. I suppose, as no one in these
selfish times will take trouble without pay, that either the judges
should be numbered among state pensioners, or that each work so
calmly examined must produce its regular fee: but these are
after-considerations; and be sure no writer will grudge a guinea for
calm, unbought, unsuspected justice bestowed upon his brain-child. Let
all those members of the tribunal, deciding by ballot, (here in an
assembly where all are good, great, and honest, I shrink not from that
word of evil omen,) judge, as far as possible, together and not
separately, of all kinds of literature: I would not have poets
sentencing all the poetry, historians all the history, novelists all the
novels, and theologists all the works upon religion; for humanity is at
the best infirm, and motives little searchable; but let all judge
equally in a sort of open court. The m