In the same way, it is superfluous for the book reporter to say that Miss Such-and-Such’s book on New York is rotten. All he need do is to set down the incredible fact that Miss Such-and-Such locates the Woolworth building at Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third street, and refers to the Aquarium as the fisheries section of the Bronx Zoo. If this should not appear a sufficient notice of the horrible nature of the volume the reporter may very properly give the truth about the Woolworth building and the Aquarium for the benefit of people who have never visited New York and might be unable to detect Miss Such-and-Such’s idiosyncrasies. The rule holds in less tangible matters. Why should the book reporter ask his reader to accept his dictum that the literary style of a writer is atrocious when he can easily prove it by a few sentences or a paragraph from the book? 15 Yet books are still in the main “reviewed,” instead of being given into the hands of trained news reporters. Anything worse than the average book “review” it would certainly be difficult to find in the length and breadth of America. And England, despite the possession of some brilliant talents, is nearly as badly off. No one who is not qualified as a critic should attempt to criticise new books. There are but few critics in any generation--half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men in any single one of the larger countries are all who could qualify at a given time; that much seems evident. What is a critic? A critic is a person with an education unusually wide either in life or in letters, and preferably in both. He is a person with huge backgrounds. He has read thousands of books and has by one means or another abstracted the essence of thousands more. He has perhaps travelled a good deal, though this is not essential; but he has certainly lived with a most peculiar and exceptional intensity, descending to greater emotional and intellectual depths than the majority of mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in some degree, the faculty of living other people’s lives and sharing their human experiences which is the faculty that, in a transcendent degree, belongs to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the past and the present so well that he is able to erect standards, or uncover old standards, by which he can and does measure the worth of everything that comes before him. He can actually show you, in exact and inescapable detail, how De Morgan compares with Dickens and how Gilbert K. Chesterton ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned more from Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he can trace the relation between a period in the life of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in _The Arrow of Gold_.