As to the first class: Nothing we have said here is _lèse majesté_ to the true senate of learned, patient, deliberate, grave, and kindly critics. They are our intellectual physicians, who heal the infirmities of us common men. We submit gladly to their treatment, and learn much by the frequent operations we have to undergo. If the surgeon be rough and his knife sharp, yet he knows better than we, and the smart will make us wiser and more wary, perhaps more real for the time to come. There is, indeed, a constant danger of literary unreality. A great author is reported to have said: "When I want to understand a subject, I write a book about it." Unfortunately, great authors are few, and many books are written by those who do not understand the subject either before or after the fact. The facility of printing has deluged the world with unreal, because shallow, books. Such medical and surgical critics are, therefore, benefactors of the human race. As to the second class, of those who know just as much as the author they criticise, it would be better for the world that they were fewer or less prompt to judge. The assumption of the critic is that he knows more than his author; and the belief in which we waste our time over their criticisms is that they have something to add to the book. It is dreary work to find, after all, that we have been reading only the book itself in fragments and in another type. But, lastly, there is a class of critics always ready for anything, the swashbucklers of the Press, who will write at any moment on any subject in newspaper, magazine, or review. Wake them out of their first sleep, and give them something to answer, or to ridicule, or to condemn. It is all one to them. The book itself gives the terminology, and the references, and the quotations, which may be re-quoted with a change of words. We remember two criticisms of the same work in the same week: one laudatory, especially of the facility and accuracy of its classical translations; the other damnatory for its cumbrous and unscholarlike versions. The critic of the black cap was asked by a classical friend whether he had read the book. He said, "No, I smelt it." This unworshipful company of critics is formidable for their numbers, their vocabulary, and their anonymous existence. Their dwelling is not known; but we imagine that it may be not far from Lord Bacon's House of Wisdom, the inmates of which, when they "come forth, lift their hand in the attitude of benediction with the look of those that pity men." HENRY EDWARD, Cardinal Archbishop, in _Merry England_. The Celts of South America.