It is of prime necessity to bring back the currency of criticism to the old hard-money basis. We have been gradually losing all sense of the true relation between words and things,--the surest symptom of intellectual decline. And this looseness of criticism reacts in the most damaging way upon literature by continually debasing the standard, and by confounding all distinction between fame and notoriety. Ought it to be gratifying to the author of "Popular Sovereignty, a Poem in Twelve Cantos," to be called the most remarkable man of the age, when he knows that he shares that preeminence with Mr. Tupper, nay, with half the names in the Directory? Indiscriminate eulogy is the subtlest form of depreciation, for it makes all praise suspicious. We look upon artistic genius as the rarest and most wayward apparition among mankind. It cannot be predicated upon any of Mr. Buckle's averages. Given the census, you may, perhaps, say so many murders, so many suicides, so many misdirected letters (and men of letters), but not so many geniuses. In this one thing old Mother Nature will be whimsical and womanish. This is a gift that John Bull, or Johnny Crapaud, or Brother Jonathan does not find in his stocking every Christmas. Crude imagination is common enough,--every hypochondriac has a more than Shakspearian allowance of it; fancy is cheap, or nobody would dream; eloquence sits ten deep on every platform. But genius in Art is that supreme organizing and idealizing faculty which, by combining, arranging, modulating, by suppressing the abnormal and perpetuating the essential, apes creation,--which from the shapeless terror or tipsy fancy of the benighted ploughman can conjure the sisters of Fores heath and the court of Titania,--which can make language thunder or coo at will,--which, in short, is the ruler of those qualities any one of which in excess is sure to overmaster the ordinary mind, and which can crystallize helpless vagary into the clearly outlined and imperishable forms of Art.