eadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness with
subtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness,
severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities be
effective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides the
union of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of wit
with philosophy,--but hold: at this rate, in order to fit out the
critic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr.
Johnson declared, the poet ought to know everything and to have seen
everything, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly,
the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as
generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by
the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the
Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the
critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his
birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and
sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be
susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the
critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to
measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual
and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing
aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines
that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who
is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be
able swiftly to follow these lines.

Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a
veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications,
which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal
allotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M.
Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a
mellow, radiant geniality. The other, which is of still deeper
account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue--for so it deserves
to be called--born directly of the nobler sensibilities, those
in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the
profound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed with
these higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all. Not
only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can
as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying
failures to reach