s; he may have in his own person contributed good literature
to swell the literary sum. But has he done anything to aid the general
grasp of that literary sum, to place his man under certain lights and in
certain aspects, with due allowance for the possibility of other aspects
and other lights? Very often, I think, it must be admitted that he has
not. I should be the first to admit that my own attempts to do this are
unsuccessful and faulty; and I only plead for them that they are such
attempts, and that they have been made on the basis of tolerably wide
and tolerably careful reading.

For, after all, it is this reading which is the main and principal
thing. It will not of course by itself make a critic; but few are the
critics that will ever be made without it. We have at this moment an
awful example of an exceedingly clever writer who has commenced critic,
disdaining this preparation. Some of my friends jeer or comminate at Mr.
Howells; for my part I only shudder and echo the celebrated "There, but
for the grace of God." Here is a clever man, a very clever man, an
excellent though of late years slightly depraved practitioner in one
branch of art, who, suddenly and without preparation, takes to another,
and becomes a spectacle to men and angels. I hope that we shall one day
have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical _dicta_ on novels and other
things; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible
of books as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge. To
read what Mr. Howells says of Mr. Thackeray is almost an illiberal
education. The reason of the error is quite obvious. It is simply that
the clever American does not know; he has not sufficient range of
comparison. For my own part, I should not dare to continue criticising
so much as a circulating library novel, if I did not perpetually pay my
respects to the classics of many literatures: and I am not sure that I
do not appreciate the classics of many literatures all the better from
my not infrequent reading of circulating library novels.

The only objection of validity that I have ever seen taken to what I
have ventured to call comparative criticism, is that it proceeds too
much, as the most learned of living French critics once observed of an
English writer, _par cases et par compartiments_, that is to say, as I
understand M. Brunetiere, with a rather too methodical classification.
This, however, was written some seven or eight years