till the end that to disparage a good writer is to be, at least on this point, superior to him. They are afraid that if the world welcomes this wit and beauty it will have no welcome for their own dullness. That is the secret fear that is a cause of a great deal of the worst sort of bad criticism. There is a league of dullness constantly making war on wit and beauty. Its malice is not deliberate: it is scarcely intelligent enough to be deliberate. It is founded not on reason, but on the instinct of self-defence. It is difficult, I admit, to say how far the disparagement of good writing is the result of mere stupidity and how far it is the result of malignity. The longer one lives, the more one is amazed at the incredible achievements of human stupidity. Possibly, then, the critics who attempted to drag down Keats to the level of bad writers were merely ordinary stupid human beings--good men in the bosoms of their families, but fools anywhere else. They had, after all, standards to which Keats did not conform. They had either to abuse Keats or to trample on their standards--which would have been like trampling on themselves. Keats himself, by the vehemence of his attack on Pope and his followers, had provoked the controversial spirit. He was to them a blasphemer in the temple, who had to be punished at all costs. There is much the same reason, no doubt, for the virulence with which the dull have assailed the wits in all ages. Wit by its very nature is a declaration of war not only on dullness, but on the dull orthodoxies, and the dull and the orthodox return bite for blow. Molière brought great trouble on his head by being witty. He held the mirror up to fools, and in answer the fools baited him. He had not all the critics against him, but only all the stupid critics. That is a distinction that should always be remembered in any discussion on literary criticism. Many writers, wearied by the slings and arrows of outrageous critics, have settled down into the easy conviction that all criticism is a waste of words. Disraeli dismissed the whole brood of critics in the saying that critics are those who have failed in literature. This, of course, is a libel on a reputable art. The success of such critics as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Gosse is literary success as desirable as that of most poets or novelists. At the same time, there is a half-truth in the saying of Disraeli. There is no critic who does more injury to the reputation of his art than the embittered failure--the man who has shouted in the world’s ear and has yet not made himself heard. To speak to a deaf man makes some people angry: to speak to a deaf world has the same effect on many writers. Nature is kind, and she enables writers of this sort to deceive themselves into thinking that their ill-natured egoism is a sort of divine anger on behalf of great art. Their self-righteousness masks itself as literary piety. Coleridge a hundred years ago noticed the irritability