"Man," said Goethe, "recognizes and praises only that which he himself is capable of doing; and those who by nature are mediocre have the trick of depreciating productions which, if they have faults, have also good points, so as to elevate the mediocre productions which they are fitted to praise." "While it is so undesirable that any man should receive what he has not examined, a far more frequent danger is that of flippant irreverence. Not all the heavens contain is obvious to the unassisted eye of the careless spectator. Few men are great, almost as few able to appreciate greatness. The critics have written little upon the Iliad in all these ages which Alexander would have thought worth keeping with it in his golden box. Nor Shakespeare, nor Dante, nor Calderon, have as yet found a sufficient critic, though Coleridge and the Schlegels have lived since they did. Meantime," continues Margaret Fuller, "it is safer to take off the hat and shout vivat! to the conqueror, who may become a permanent sovereign, than to throw stones and mud from the gutter. The star shines, and that it is with no borrowed light, his foes are his voucher. And every planet is a portent to the world; but whether for good or ill, only he can know who has science for many calculations. Not he who runs can read these books, or any books of any worth." Homer was called a plagiarist by some of the earlier critics, and was accused of having stolen from older poets all that was remarkable in the Iliad and Odyssey. Sophocles was brought to trial by his children as a lunatic. Socrates, considered as the wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and Athenaeus as illiterate. Plato was accused of envy, lying, avarice, robbery, incontinence, and impiety. Some of the old writers wrote to prove Aristotle vain, ambitious, and ignorant. Plato is said to have preferred the burning of all of the works of Democritus. Pliny and Seneca thought Virgil destitute of invention, and Quintilian was alike severe upon Seneca. It was a long time, says Seneca, that Democritus was taken for a madman, and before Socrates had any esteem in the world. How long was it before Cato could be understood? Nay, he was affronted, contemned, and rejected; and people never knew the value of him until they had lost him. "The Northern Highlanders," said Wilson, "do not admire Waverley, so I presume the Southern Highlanders despise Guy Mannering. The Westmoreland peasants think Wordsworth a fool. In Borrowdale, Southey is not known to exist. I met ten men at Hawick who did not think Hogg a poet, and the whole city of Glasgow think me a madman. So much for the voice of the people being the voice of God."