eousness, and that it was this
mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you
come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may
confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the precious
metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all intents
and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold
yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it is
something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of oroide, say?
You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and what right,
then, have you to recognize that something else is fine gold when it is
really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about thirteen carats
when it is actually eighteen?

Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the
point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the
desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond longing
amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he has got too
much praise, though he never has got all he wants. "Why don't they
clap?" Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his
audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing like
Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. "Do they
think I can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times three? I can
stand it very well." An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely
praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation
trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of
insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine
fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought,
therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the
article of criticism, but somehow it is not.

Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which, unwillingly
enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can. Its
convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon its
qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits
assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The
author would not mind if the critic's report were physically
commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand
that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain.
Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number w