Nearly two thousand years ago Horace observed that, though every calling presupposed some qualification in those who followed it, and a man who knew nothing of marine affairs would not undertake to manage a ship, or a man who knew nothing of drugs to compound prescriptions, yet everybody fancied himself competent to commence poet. Qualified or unqualified, at it we all go, he complains, and scribble verses. But times have changed, and those who in Horace’s day were the pests of poetry, with which they could amuse themselves without mischief, have now become the pests of another kind of literature in which their diversions are not quite so harmless. Where the poetaster once stood the criticaster now stands. The transformation of the one pest into the other, where they do not, as they often do, become both, is easily accounted for, and as Dr. Johnson has so excellently explained it, we cannot do better than transcribe his words. “Criticism,” says the Doctor, “is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may by mere labour be attained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others, and he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant may yet support his vanity by the name of critic.” But criticasters and their patrons have improved on this--for “he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant” may, in our time, not merely support his vanity, but support himself. Till we inspected the volumes before us, we had really no conception of the pass to which things have now come in so-called criticism. The writer sits in judgment on most of the authors who have, during recent years, been before the public. He passes sentence not merely on current novelists, poets, and essayists, but on some of our classics, and on books like the late Mr. Pater’s _Lectures on Plato and Platonism_ and Dr. Wharton’s edition of _Sappho_. To any acquaintance with the principles of criticism, to any conception of criticism in relation to principles, to any learning, to any scholarship, to any knowledge of the history of literature and of the masterpieces of literature, either in our own language or in other languages, he has not the smallest pretension. Nor does he allow this to be gathered simply from the work itself, where it is, needless to say, abundantly apparent, but with a _naïveté_ and impudence which are at once ludicrous and exasperating he glories in his ignorance. Literature and its interpretation are to him what the Bible and its interpretation were to the ranting sectaries of Dryden’s satire. In its explanation knowledge and learning were folly, nothing was needed but “grace.” “No measure ta’en from knowledge, all from grace, Study and pains were now no more their care, Texts were explained by fasting and by prayer.”