"Besides, suppose for a moment that all professional critics were Sir-Peter-Lauried in the most complete manner, who should help to guide the popular mind in determining on the merits of a work? Are we to trust the written puffs of the author's publisher, or the spoken puffs of his friends? Or are _authors_ only to judge of authors, and is it quite certain that in this way we shall always obtain unprejudiced and competent judgments? Or shall we make an ultimate appeal to the public themselves, and decide a book's merits by its sale--a test that would put Jim Crow infinitely before Philip Van Artevelde? No doubt a _bad_ critic is a very bad thing; but it is not a remarkably equitable proceeding to judge of any class by the worst specimens of it; and surely it is no fairer to condemn critics _en masse_, because some of them have formed erroneous judgments or uttered predictions which time has falsified, than it would be to condemn authors _en masse_, because many of them have written stupid or dangerous books. Let us ask ourselves soberly what a critic is--not the caricature of one that Bulwer would draw, but such an idea of one as any dispassionate and well-informed man would conceive. In the first place, criticism depends very much on taste, and taste is of all faculties that which is founded on and supported by education and cultivation. Therefore the critic must be a liberally educated man in the highest sense of the term. And as he has to be conversant with niceties of thought and expression, philology and the classics should have formed a prominent element in his education. We should be very suspicious of that man's critical capacity, who had not thoroughly studied (by which we do _not_ mean being able to speak) at least one language besides his own. Then, as a matter of course, before beginning to write about books, he must have read many books of all sorts, and not only read, but studied and comprehended them. All which will help us to see why the professional critic is likely to be a better judge of books than the professional author, because the preparation of the former renders him eminently eclectic; while the latter is apt to have a bias toward peculiarities of his own, and thus to judge of others by a partial standard.