The specimens of natural history are perfect after their kind; the main question with them is, to which kind or species does a given specimen belong? But the poem or the history or the novel is not always perfect after its kind. Their kind is usually obvious at a glance, but their merits or demerits, their relation to the best that has been thought and done in the world, are not so obvious. Hence we praise or blame according as they come up to or fall short of their own ideal. The critic is not so much a botanist naming a new flower, as he is a brother gardener criticising your horticulture, or a brother lawyer criticising your brief. We are all critics in this sense one way or another every day of our lives; we try to get at the real value of whatever is offered us, whether it be lands, houses, goods, friends, stocks, bonds, news, pictures, or books; we criticise the men we deal with and employ in order to find out whom to trust; we must have our wits about us when we go to market or go shopping. The critical habit--sifting, testing, comparing, to get at the true value of things--goes with us through life, or else we come often to grief. The finer the product, or the higher the purpose it serves, the more careful is our investigation. When we come to literature and art our worldly practical wisdom does not carry very far. It is not now a question of fact or of material values, but of ideal and æsthetic values; it is a question of truth to nature and to life, and of the largest, most vital truth. The mass of readers have little power of divining the good from the bad, the true from the false, in this field. Not the first best, but the second or third best will draw the multitude. The literary value of a work is more intangible and elusive, harder to define and bring out, than its scientific or moral or other values. It resides in a certain vitality and genuineness of expression; we have a sense of having come face to face with something real and alive in the man, and not, as is so often the case; with something assumed or put on. There is always an original inherent quality and flavor, as in natural products. The language is not the mere garment of the thought, it is the very texture and substance. In all true literature something more than mind and erudition speak,--a man speaks; a vital personality is imminent,--a Charles Lamb, a Wordsworth, a Carlyle, a Huxley, an Emerson, a Thoreau, a Lowell,--all distinct types of intelligence speaking through character. Self-expression within certain limits is as important in criticism as in any other form of literature. The French critic Ferdinand Brunetière says that the truly personal way of seeing and feeling, which is a merit of the poet and the novelist, is a fault in the critic, because the critical function is mainly a judicial one.