Addison says, somewhere in the _Spectator_, that ridicule is assumed superiority. Criticism is asserted superiority. Sometimes it may be justified, as when the shoemaker told Titian that he had stitched the shoe of a Doge of Venice in the wrong place. Sometimes it is not equally to be justified, as in the critics of the Divine Government of the world, to whom Butler in his "Analogy" meekly says that, if they only knew the whole system of all things, with all the reasons of them, and the last end to which all things and reasons are directed, they might, peradventure, be of another opinion. There are some benevolent critics whose life is spent in watching the characters and conduct of all around them. They note every word and tone and gesture; they have a formed, and not a favorable, judgment of all we do and all we leave undone. It does not much matter which: if we did so, we ought not to have done it; if we did not, we ought to have done so. Such critics have, no doubt, an end and place in creation. Socrates told the Athenians that he was their "gadfly." There is room, perhaps, for one gadfly in a city; but in a household, wholesome companions they may be, but not altogether pleasant. These may be called critics of moral superiority. Again, there are Biblical critics, who spend their lives over a text in Scripture, all equally confident, and no two agreed. An old English author irreverently compares them to a cluster of monkeys, who, having found a glowworm, "heaped sticks upon it, and blowed themselves out of breath to set it alight." We commend this incident in scientific history to whomsoever may have inherited Landseer's pallet and brush, under the title of "Doctors in Divinity," for the Royal Academy in next May. This reminds us of the historical critics who have erected the treatment of the most uncertain of all matters into the certainty of science, by the simple introduction of one additional compound, their own personal infallibility. The universal Church assembled in Council under the guidance of its Head does not, cannot and what is worse, will not, know its own history, or the true interpretation of its own records and acts. But, by a benign though tardy provision, the science of history has arisen, like the art of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, to recall the Church from its deviations to the recognition of its own true misdeeds. Such higher intelligences may be called and revered as the Pontiffs of the Realm of Criticism. We are warned, however, not to profane this awful Hierarchy of superior persons by further analysis. We will, therefore, end with three canons, not so much of criticism as of moral common sense. A critic knows more than the author he criticises, or just as much, or at least somewhat less.