"What a farrago of old fables is this! What a dressing up in old
clothes!" says the critic. (I think I see such a one--a Solomon that sits
in judgment over us authors and chops up our children.) "As sure as I am
just and wise, modest, learned, and religious, so surely I have read
something very like this stuff and nonsense about jackasses and foxes
before. That wolf in sheep's clothing?--do I not know him? That fox
discoursing with the crow?--have I not previously heard of him? Yes, in
Lafontaine's fables: let us get the Dictionary and the Fable and the
Biographie Universelle, article Lafontaine, and confound the impostor."

"Then in what a contemptuous way," may Solomon go on to remark, "does
this author speak of human nature! There is scarce one of these
characters he represents but is a villain. The fox is a flatterer; the
frog is an emblem of impotence and envy; the wolf in sheep's clothing a
bloodthirsty hypocrite, wearing the garb of innocence; the ass in the
lion's skin a quack trying to terrify, by assuming the appearance of a
forest monarch (does the writer, writhing under merited castigation, mean
to sneer at critics in this character? We laugh at the impertinent
comparison); the ox, a stupid commonplace; the only innocent being in the
writer's (stolen) apologue is a fool--the idiotic lamb, who does not know
his own mother!" And then the critic, if in a virtuous mood, may indulge
in some fine writing regarding the holy beauteousness of maternal
affection.

Why not? If authors sneer, it is the critic's business to sneer at them
for sneering. He must pretend to be their superior, or who would care
about his opinion? And his livelihood is to find fault. Besides, he is
right sometimes; and the stories he reads, and the characters drawn in
them, are old, sure enough. What stories are new? All types of all