If we go a little higher, things are almost as bad, if not quite so ridiculous. In everything but in criticism it is necessary to specialize. A man who posed as an authority on all the literatures of the world, and on the history of every nation in the world, would be very justly set down as an impostor. And yet pretentions which men would be the first to ridicule, as private individuals, they do not scruple to claim, as critics. An historical student enriches History with a volume throwing new and important light on some obscure episode or period; a classical student deserves the gratitude of scholars for an invaluable monograph; English Literature or one of the Continental Literatures is illustrated by a series of dissertations as instructive as they are original; or a truly memorable contribution has been made to political philosophy, to æsthetics, or to ethics. What is their fate? It is by no means improbable that they will be ‘reviewed,’ in the course of a few days, by the same man for three or four, or it may be for five or six, daily and weekly journals, and their fortune in the market made or marred by a censor who has probably done no more than glance at their half-cut pages, and who, if he had studied them from end to end, would have been no more competent to take their measure than he would have been to write them. This leads, it is needless to say, to every kind of abuse: to works which deserve to be authorities on the subjects of which they treat dropping at once into oblivion, to works which every scholar knows to be below contempt usurping their places; to the deprivation of all stimulus to honourable exertion on the part of authors of ability and industry; to the encouragement of charlatans and fribbles; to gross impositions on the public. A very amusing and edifying record might be compiled partly out of a selection of the various verdicts passed contemporaneously by reviews on particular works, and partly out of comparisons of the subsequent fortunes of works with their fortunes while submitted to this censorship.