ted with
the epigram in 'Lothair' about critics being authors who have failed. I
know not who said this first; but it was certainly not Disraeli. Landor
makes Porson tell Southey: 'Those who have failed as writers turn
reviewers.' The classical passage is in Sainte-Beuve. Balzac, he says,
said somewhere of a sculptor who had become discouraged: 'Redevenu
artiste _in partibus_, il avait beaucoup de succes dans les salons, il
etait consulte par beaucoup d'amateurs; _il passa critique comme tous
les impuissants qui mentent a leurs debuts_.' Sainte-Beuve, naturally
indignant at a phrase aimed against his craft, if not against himself,
says that this may be true of a sculptor or painter who deserts his art
in order to talk; 'mais, dans l'ordre de la pensee, cette parole de M.
de Balzac qui revient souvent sous la plume de toute une ecole de jeunes
litterateurs, est a la fois (je leur en demande pardon) une injustice et
une erreur.'--'Causeries du Lundi,' vol. ii. p. 455. A very similar
phrase is to be found in a book where one would hardly look for such
epigrams, Marryat's 'King's Own.' But to trace such witticisms to their
first source is a task for 'Notes and Queries.'

_MASSINGER_

In one of the best of his occasional essays, Kingsley held a brief for
the plaintiffs in the old case of Puritans _versus_ Playwrights. The
litigation in which this case represents a minor issue has lasted for a
period far exceeding that of the most pertinacious lawsuit, and is not
likely to come to an end within any assignable limits of time. When the
discussion is pressed home, it is seen to involve fundamentally
different conceptions of human life and its purposes; and it can only
cease when we have discovered the grounds of a permanent conciliation
between the ethical and the aesthetic elements of human nature. The
narrower controversy between the stage and the Church has itself a long
history. It has left some curious marks upon English literature. The
prejudice which uttered itself through the Puritan Prynne was inherited,
in a later generation, by the High-Churchmen Collier and William Law.
The attack, it is true, may be ostensibly directed--as in Kingsley's
essay--against the abuse of the stage rather than against the stage
itself. Kingsley pays the usual tribute to Shakespeare whilst denouncing
the whole literature of which Shakespeare's dramas are the most
conspicuous product. But then, everybody always distinguishes in terms