The principles of taste, the art of criticism, are not acquired amidst the hurly-burly of living authors and the hasty judgments thereupon of hasty critics, but by the study, careful and reverential, of the immortal dead. In this study the critics are of immense use to us. Dryden, Addison, Gray, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Bagehot, Swinburne, reveal to us their highest critical powers not whilst vivisecting a contemporary, but when expounding the anatomy of departed greatness. Teach me rightly to admire Milton and Keats, and I will find my own criticism of living poets. Help me to enjoy, however feebly, Homer and Dante, and I will promise not to lose my head over Pollok’s ‘Course of Time,’ or Mr. Bailey’s ‘Festus.’ Fire my enthusiasm for Henry Vaughan and George Herbert, and I shall be able to distinguish between the muses of Miss Frances Ridley Havergal and of Miss Christina Rossetti. Train me to become a citizen of the true Republic of Letters, and I shall not be found on my knees before false gods, or trooping with the vulgar to crown with laurel brazen brows. In conclusion, one may say that though authors cannot be expected to love their critics, they might do well to remember that it is not the critics who print, but the reading community whose judgments determine an author’s place amongst contemporary writers. It may be annoying to be sneered at by an anonymous critic in the _Saturday Review_, but it is quite as bad to be sneered at by a stranger in a railway carriage. The printed sneer may be read by more people than overheard the spoken sneer; but printed sneers are not easily transferred from writer to reader in their original malice. One may enjoy a sneer without sneering. Authors may also advantageously remember that we live in hurried times, and enjoy scanty leisure for reading, and that of necessity the greater fraction of that leisure belongs to the dead. Merely a nodding acquaintance with Shakespeare is not maintained without a considerable expenditure of time. The volumes with which every man of ordinary literary taste would wish to be familiar can only be numbered by thousands. We must therefore be allowed time, and there is always plenty. Every good poem, novel, play, at once joins and becomes part and parcel of the permanent stock of English literature, and some time or another will be read and criticised. It is quite safe. Every author of spirit repudiates with lofty scorn the notion that he writes in obedience to any mandate from the public. It is the wretched, degraded politician whose talk is of mandates; authors know nothing of mandates, they have missions. But if so, they must be content to bide their time. If a town does turn out to meet a missionary, it is usually not with loud applause, but with large stones.