of minor poets--“men of undoubted talents but not of genius,” whose tempers are “rendered yet more irritable by their desire to _appear_ men of genius.” That is the irritation that is the cause of so much bad criticism. The critic who feels irritated should begin to suspect himself, and ask himself whether it is the excellences or the faults of the work he is criticising that have put him in a temper. We are often told in these days that criticism is too gentle. In a world in which such a mass of criticism is being written it is difficult to sum up the tendencies of the whole period in a phrase. There may be an excess of unintelligent praise, but there is also, it seems to me, an excess of unintelligent carping and ill-tempered denigration. The present age, like Coleridge’s, might be described as “this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.” Not that even men of genius have always been just to each other. Byron was unjust to Shakespeare and Keats: Keats was unjust to Pope. But we do not demand sound criticism as a right from a great poet, who may easily feel the partiality of a specialist. The meanness of the mean critic is of quite another sort. He is a fox without a tail, who could only feel important in a world of foxes without tails. He is always in search of a standard according to which even he will have a chance of seeming great. That is why in every generation good writers are attacked and dull writers are exalted by this sort of critic. The cult of the dull, of the mediocre, is necessary in order that he, too, may win some reverence. The whole thing is, it seems to me, a pathetic delusion. The critic may for a time organise fame for dull painters and dull writers, and he may win a year’s or ten years’ praise by doing so. But all the time he is losing that generous and disinterested spirit which is one of the most precious possessions of the artist. The ordinary writer sets out with the hope of qualifying for a place in the temple of fame: he ends too often by merely qualifying for a place in the _Dunciad_. He may be a man of one talent, which would serve well enough if put to proper uses, but he prefers to hide it and to pretend that it is ten, railing all the while at others on the ground that they have only five. I used to think that it was un-Christian of the Founder of Christianity to give the man with one talent so poor a name compared to the man with five or the man with ten. But I have long since come to see that in doing so he spoke out of a profound knowledge of human nature. The man with one talent is the most likely of all to make no use of it. He does not see that even his poverty may be turned into riches, as is obvious when one remembers such Lilliputian and immortal poets as Lovelace.