It is no part of an honest critic’s business to be personally offensive. It is no part of his function to find a pleasure in giving pain. But it is a part of his business, which is not to be escaped, to do his fearless best to tell the truth, and the truth about Mr. Crockett and the press is not to be told without giving deep offence, to him and it. Fortunately, the press is a very wide corporation indeed, and if there are venal people employed upon it, there are at least as many scrupulously honourable; and if there are stupid people who can be carried by a cry, there are men of all grades of brilliant ability, ranging from genius to talent To put the matter in plain English will offend neither honesty nor ability, and to give offence to venality or incompetence is not an act of peculiar daring. In plain English, then, it is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about which no two men who are even moderately competent to judge can dispute for a second. The newspaper press, or a very considerable section of it, has conspired to set Mr. Crockett upon an eminence so removed from his fitness for it that he is made ridiculous by the mere fact of being perched there. When Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from the hysteria of praise, the natural feeling was to save an exquisite artist from the excusable exaltations of enthusiasm. When the genuine art and real fun and touching pathos of Mr. J. M. Barrie hurried his admirers into uncritical ecstasy, one’s only fear was lest the popular taste should take an undeserved revenge in coldness and neglect. To say in the first flush of affection and enjoyment that ‘A Window in Thrums’ is as good as Sir Walter, or that ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ is better, is not to exercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. It is the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural ejaculation of gratitude for a beautiful gift. It is only when the judgment comes to be persisted in that we find any element of danger in it. It is only when gravely and strenuously repeated, as in Stevenson’s case, that it is to be resented, and then mainly on the ground that it does harm to the object of it. But in the case now under review the conditions are not the same. Poor Stevenson, whose early death is still a poignant grief was indubitably a man of genius. Settle the question of stature how you may, there is no denying the species to which such a writer belongs. Mr. Barrie _has_ genius--which is a slightly different thing. But Mr. Crockett in the great rank of letters is ‘as just and mere a serving-man as any born of woman,’ and there has been as much banging of the paragraphic drum concerning him, and as assured a proclamation of