"If," as I said, "these men--these Platos and Socrateses and Ciceros
and Sophocleses and Aristophaneses and Aristotles and the rest of them
had been taking advantage of my absence to go about the world spoiling
my business for me, I would rather not hear any more about them."

And I put on my hat and came out, and I have never tried to write
anything original since.

I dreamed a dream once. (It is the sort of thing a man would dream.
You cannot very well dream anything else, I know. But the phrase
sounds poetical and biblical, and so I use it.) I dreamed that I was
in a strange country--indeed, one might say an extraordinary country.
It was ruled entirely by critics.

The people in this strange land had a very high opinion of
critics--nearly as high an opinion of critics as the critics
themselves had, but not, of course, quite--that not being
practicable--and they had agreed to be guided in all things by the
critics. I stayed some years in that land. But it was not a cheerful
place to live in, so I dreamed.

There were authors in this country, at first, and they wrote books.
But the critics could find nothing original in the books whatever, and
said it was a pity that men, who might be usefully employed hoeing
potatoes, should waste their time and the time of the critics, which
was of still more importance, in stringing together a collection of
platitudes, familiar to every school-boy, and dishing up old plots and
stories that had already been cooked and recooked for the public until
everybody had been surfeited with them.