But this spirit of tolerance and charity has also become attenuated into the spirit of mere _laissez-faire_. We have no lack of real scholars and of real critics, who see through the whole thing, and probably deplore it; but they make no sign, look on with a sort of amused perplexity, and do their own work, thankful, no doubt, sometimes, when it is oppressive, that they need not be over-scrupulous about its quality. If, occasionally, they get a little impatient and indulge their genius, protest goes no further than sarcasm and irony, so fine that it is intelligible only among themselves; while the objects of their satire, as well as the general public, missing the one and misinterpreting the other, take it all for applause. Resistance, it is said, is useless. Literature is a trade. What has come was inevitable: _vive la bagatelle_, and drift with the stream. And now let us consider what are the results of all this. The first and most important is the degradation of criticism. Criticism is to Literature what legislation and government are to States. If they are in able and honest hands all goes well; if they are in weak and dishonest hands all is anarchy and mischief. And as government in a Republic, the true analogy to the sphere of which we are speaking, is represented not by those who form the minority in its councils, but by those who form the majority, so in criticism, it is not on the few but on the many among those who represent it, that its authority and influence depend. And what are its characteristics in the hands of its prevailing majority--in the hands of those who are its legislators in a realm co-extensive with the reading world? It is not criticism at all. To criticism, in the true sense of the term, it has no claim even to approximation. It seems to have resolved itself into something which wants a name,--something which is partly dithyramb and partly rhetoric. Without standards, without touchstones, without principles, without knowledge, it appears to be regarded as the one calling for which no equipment and no training are needed. What a master of the art has called the final fruit of careful discipline and of much experience is assumed to come spontaneously. A man of literary tastes is born cultured. A critic, like a poet, is the pure product of nature. Such canons as these “critics” have are the mysterious and somewhat perplexing evolutions of their own inner consciousness, or derived, not from the study of classical writers in English or in any other language, of all of whom they are probably profoundly ignorant, but from a current acquaintance with the writings of contemporaries, who are, in intelligence and performance, a little in advance of themselves. But what they lack in attainments they make up in impudence. The effrontery of some of these “critics,” whose verdicts, ludicrous to relate, are daily recorded as “opinions of the Press,” literally exceeds belief.