In the good old times we are told that a buffet from the hand of an
Edinburgh or Quarterly Reviewer would lay a young author dead at his
feet. If it was so, he must have been naturally very deficient in
vitality. It certainly did not kill Byron, though it was a knock-down
blow; he rose from that combat from earth, like Antæus, all the
stronger for it. The story of its having killed Keats, though embalmed
in verse, is apocryphal; and if such blows were not fatal in those
times, still less so are they nowadays. On the other hand, if authors
are difficult to slay, it is infinitely harder work to give them life
by what the doctors term 'artificial respiration'--puffing. The amount
of breath expended in the days of 'the Quarterlies' in this hopeless
task would have moved windmills. Not a single favourite of those
critics--selected, that is, from favouritism, and apart from
merit--now survives. They failed even to obtain immortality for the
writers in whom there was really something of genius, but whom they
extolled beyond their deserts. Their pet idol, for example, was Samuel
Rogers. And who reads Rogers's poems now? We remember something about
them, and that is all; they are very literally 'Pleasures of Memory.'

And if these things are true of the past, how much more so are they of
the present! I venture to think, in spite of some voices to the
contrary, that criticism is much more honest than it used to be:
certainly less influenced by political feeling, and by the interests
of publishing houses; more temperate, if not more judicious, and--in
the higher literary organs, at least--unswayed by personal prejudice.
But the result of even the most favourable notices upon a book is now
but small. I can remember when a review in the _Times_ was calculated
by the 'Row' to sell an entire edition. Those halcyon days--if halcyon
days they were--are over. People read books for themselves now; judge
for themselves; and buy only when they are absolutely compelled, and