If his pages had come before me as the work of an unknown man, seeking his proper place in the paper republic, it is certain that I could have found some honest and agreeable things to say about him. But, unfortunately, he, more than any other writer of his day, has been signalled out for those uncostly extravagances of praise which are fast discrediting us in our own eyes, and are making what should be the art of criticism a mockery, and something of a shame. In what I have written I have dealt less with his work than with the false estimate of it which, for a year or two, has been thrust upon the public by a certain band of writers who are either hopelessly incompetent to assess our labours or incurably dishonest, It is very possible indeed that Mr. Crockett is wholly undeserving of censure in this regard, that he has not in any way asked or aided the manufacture of this balloon of a reputation in which he has been floated to such heights. Apart from the pretensions of his _claque_, there is no earthly reason why a critic should hold him up to ridicule. It is not he who is ridiculous, but at its best his position is respectable, and he holds his place (like the mob of us who write for a living) for the moment only. To pretend that he is a man of genius, to talk about him in the same breath with Sir Walter Scott, to chronicle his comings and his goings as if he were the embodiment of a new revelation, is to provoke a natural and just resentment The more plainly that resentment is expressed--the more it is seen that a false adulation is the seed of an open contempt--the less likely writers of middling faculty will be to encourage a bloated estimate of themselves. [Since the above was written and printed Mr. Crockett has published his story of ‘Lads’ Love,’ the final chapter of which is so good that in reading it I experienced a twinge of regret for the onslaught I had made. But after all it is not the author who is attacked in what goes before, and if, in the fray with the critics, he is, incidentally, as it were, somewhat roughly handled, the over-enthusiasm of his professional admirers must bear the blame. There is much prentice work in ‘Lads’ Love,’ some strenuously enforced emotion, which is not genuine, and a congenital misunderstanding of the essential difference between tedium and humour; but if the whole of Mr. Crockett’s work had reached its level, the protest against his reviewers would have stood in need of modification.]