That is why I say the _Supplement_ disconcerts me every week. It makes me feel ignorant and, what is worse, lonely, cut off from so many human sympathies, cold to enthusiasms that are agitating other breasts, isolated in a crowd who, for all I know, may be banding themselves against me with the secret password “ergatocracy,” an uninitiated stranger among the friends of Mr. Absalom Watkin of Manchester. Indeed, unlike “the master of this college,” I am so far from feeling that “what I don’t know isn’t knowledge” as to find it the one sort of knowledge I itch to possess and suppose myself to have lost a golden opportunity in missing. There are strong men about, I am aware, who say they don’t care. They profess themselves content with knowing a few things thoroughly, with their own little set of enthusiasms, and repeat proverbs about jacks of all trades. I respect these sturdy men, but all the time my heart goes out to the other kind, the men of versatility, the men whose aim is to understand everything, to sympathize with every human emotion, to leave no corner of experience unexplored. And some such aim as this is indispensable for the critic, whose business is primarily to understand. To understand what he criticizes he has to begin by putting himself in its author’s place and standing at his point of view—to take on, in short, in turn, innumerable other personalities, temperaments, and tastes than his own. Other men may, but a critic must, be versatile. He must have the faculty of lending himself, with profusion, to other minds and other experiences—lending himself, but not giving, reserving the right of resuming his own individuality and of applying his own standards. That resumption of self is easy enough. The true difficulty is in surrendering it, even for a while. One finds the task particularly hard, I think, in lending oneself to tastes one has outgrown. Remember your schoolboy enthusiasm over Macaulay’s style. You have lost that long ago, and are now, perhaps, a little ashamed of it. Yet you must recapture it, if only for a moment; that is to say, you must try to reflect in yourself the joy that Macaulay felt in writing as he did, if you are sitting down to try to criticize him adequately. This is difficult, this momentary renunciation of your present taste in favour of the taste you have outgrown. Remember your schoolboy attitude to Scott; how you read feverishly for the story and nothing but the story, and simply skipped the long prefaces and introductions and copious historical notes? To-day your taste has matured, and you see the prefaces and notes as a welcome setting for the story, as completing for you the picture of the author’s mind in the act of composition. But you will have to go back to your discarded taste and think only of the story if you are recommending Scott to your youngsters.