r round the fire. The rain beat upon the
panes, and the wind swept the wet leaves against them, while each
exhaled a sigh of aspiration not unmixed with a soft regret.

XXII

THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM

The talk round the Easy Chair one day was of that strange passion for
reading which has of late possessed the public, and the contagion or
infection by which it has passed to hundreds of thousands who never read
before; and then the talk was of how this prodigious force might be
controlled and turned in the right way: not suffered to run to waste
like water over the dam, but directed into channels pouring upon wheels
that turn the mills of the gods or something like that. There were, of
course, a great many words; in fact, talk is composed of words, and the
people at that luncheon were there for talking as well as eating, and
they did not mind how many words they used. But the sum of their words
was the hope, after a due season of despair, that the present passion
for reading might be made to eventuate in more civilization than it
seemed to be doing, if it could be brought back to good literature,
supposing it was ever there in great strength, and the question was how
to do this.

One of the company said he had lately been reading a good many books of
Leigh Hunt's, and after everybody had interrupted with "Delightful!"
"Perfectly charming!" and the like, he went on to observe that one of
the chief merits of Hunt seemed to be his aptness in quotation. That, he
remarked, was almost a lost art with critics, who had got to thinking
that they could tell better what an author was than the author himself
could. Like every other power disused, the power of apt quotation had
died, and there were very few critics now who knew how to quote: not one
knew, as Hunt, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or the least of the great
quotational school of critics, knew. These had perhaps overworked their
gift, and might have been justly accused, as they certainly were
accused, of misleading the reader and making him think that the poets,
whose best they quoted, putting the finest lines in italics so that they
could not be missed, were as good throughout as in the passages given.
It was this sense of having abused innocence, or ignorance, which led to
the present reaction in criticism no doubt, and yet the present reaction
was an error. Suppose that the poets whose best was given by quotation
were not altogether as good as that? The