necessities, how deplorable the vein, that compelled or seduced a
man of your eminence into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary
criticism! About the writers of his own generation a leader of that
generation should hold his peace. He should neither praise nor
blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at the
buzzing ephemerae of letters. The breath of their life is in the
columns of "Literary Gossip;" and they should be allowed to perish
with the weekly advertisements on which they pasture. Reviewing, of
course, there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise
the great who have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-
finding.

Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor;
you vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What
"irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense
of wrong," drove you (in Mr. Longfellow's own words) to attack his
pure and beneficent Muse we may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow
forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to the great. It was
the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that knew not
how to forget. "The New Yorkers never forgave him," says your
latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of
their malice. It was not individual vanity alone, but the whole
literary class that you assailed. "As a literary people," you
wrote, "we are one vast perambulating humbug." After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the
vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and
writing still. He who knows them need not linger over the attacks
and defences of your personal character; he will not waste time on
calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters, and all the noisome dust
which takes so long in settling above your tomb.