for irreverent reviewers was Dr. Cumming, who
was then proving from the Apocalypse that the world would come to an end
in 1865. His ignorance of Greek and of geography, his audacious
plagiarisms from E. B. Elliott (a more learned though not a much wiser
interpreter), and his insincerity, are denounced so unsparingly as to
suggest some danger from the law of libel. Dr. Cumming, however, was
wise in his generation, and wrote a letter of such courteous and
dignified remonstrance that the 'Saturday Review' was forced to reply in
corresponding terms, though declining to withdraw its charges. The whole
world of contemporary journalism is arraigned for its subserviency to
popular prejudices. The 'Record' is lashed for its religious rancour,
and the 'Reasoner' for its vapid version of popular infidelity, though
it is contemptuously preferred, in point of spirit, to the 'Record.'
Fitzjames flies occasionally at higher game. The 'Times,' if he is to be
believed, is conspicuous for the trick of spinning empty verbiage out of
vapid popular commonplaces, and, indeed, good sense and right reason
appear to have withdrawn themselves almost exclusively to the congenial
refuge of the 'Saturday Review.'

There is, however, no shrine sacred to the vulgar in which the writer
delights in playing the part of iconoclast so heartily as in that
represented by the comic literature of the day. This sentiment, as I
have said, had grown up even in Eton schooldays. There was something
inexpressibly repugnant to Fitzjames in the tone adopted by a school of
which he took Dickens and Douglas Jerrold to be representatives. His
view of the general literary question comes out oddly in the article
upon 'The Relation of Novels to Life,' contributed to the 'Cambridge
Essays.' He has no fear of modern aesthetes before his eyes. His opinion
is that life is too serious a business for tomfoolery and far too tragic
for needless ostentation of sentiment. A novel should be a serious
attempt by a grave observer to draw a faithful portrait of the actual
facts of life. A novelist, therefore, who uses the imaginary facts, like
Sterne and Dickens, as mere pegs on which to hang specimens of his own
sensibility and facetiousness, becomes disgusting. When, he remarks, you
have said of a friend 'he is dead,' all other observations become
superfluous and impertinent. He, therefore, considers 'Robinson Crusoe'
to represent the ideal novel. It is the life of a brave man meeting