People often forget that criticism, like poetry, is of many kinds. The critics themselves are, perhaps, the worst transgressors in the matter. They are divided into almost as many sects as the theologians, and every sect but one regards its own standards as the very rules of salvation. This would not matter so much if it did not lead to the excommunication of all the critics who cannot subscribe to the same creed. There is nothing more absurd in the history of literature than the severities of the excommunicating sort of critic. A critic has the right to condemn any work, critical or other, which is bad of its kind. He has not the right to say that only his own kind of criticism is good. There are as many ways of writing about books as of writing about flowers. The poet reveals to us a different flower from the flower of the botanist. Wordsworth’s “small celandine” is not seen through the same eyes as the plant of which the botanist tells us: “The lesser celandine is a species of _Ranunculus_ (_R. Ficarus_), a small low-growing herb with smooth heart-shaped leaves and bright yellow flowers about an inch across, borne each on a stout stalk springing from a leaf-axil.” There is yet another sort of writer on flowers whose work is a charming compound of poetry, science and any sort of relevant gossip, whether philological or herbalist--who will inform us, for instance, that _Ranunculus_ is a diminutive of _rana_, “a frog,” which has the same damp, marshy haunts as the flower, and that Nicholas Culpepper held that even to carry the plant about one’s body next the skin helped to cure piles. These are but three out of scores of ways of writing about flowers, and it is mere sectarianism to deny the excellence of any of them.