Indiscriminating admiration is among the most pleasing traits of youth, but in men of mature years it loses its attractiveness. When it is no longer the effervescence of juvenile enthusiasm for which all make allowance, it becomes, like the levities of boyhood affected in middle life, merely vapid folly. In relation to its object it not only defeats its own ends, but is apt to make recipient and donor alike ridiculous. Nor is this all. By some curious law of association which we cannot pretend to explain, its almost inevitable ally is dulness, and dulness of a peculiarly wearisome and exasperating kind. During the last few years these peculiarities have become so alarmingly epidemic that it really seems high time to form, on the principle of Mr. Morris’s Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, a Society for the Preservation of Literary Reputations. When those “of whom to be dispraised were no small praise” take to eulogy and editing, an unhappy Classic may well look to his true friends. It is nothing less than appalling to behold the mountains of rubbish now gradually accumulating over the work--the real work--of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; rubbish of their own, rescued with cruel industry from the oblivion to which they would themselves have consigned it, rubbish of their commentators and editors, dulness and inanity unutterable. “What, sir,” asked an Eton boy of Foote, “was the best thing you ever said?” “Well,” was the reply, “I once saw a chimney-sweep on a high prancing, high-mettled horse. ‘There,’ said I, ‘goes Warburton on Shakespeare.’” But it is not in the Warburtons, not in the chimney-sweepers, that the mischief lies; it is in those who may be called the scavengers and sextons of literature, in those who, utterly unable to discern between what is precious and what is worthless in a man’s work, thrust all, without distinction, into prominence, and thus not only enable an author to “write himself down,” but, by their indiscriminating eulogies, assist him in his suicide. The subtlest form, indeed, which detraction can assume is over-praise, for a man is thus forced to give the lie to his own reputation.