It reminds me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a boy.
I would be sitting, as good as gold, reading "The Pirate's Lair," when
some cultured relative would look over my shoulder and say: "Bah!
what are you wasting your time with rubbish for? Why don't you go and
do something useful?" and would take the book away from me. Upon
which I would get up, and go out to "do something useful;" and would
come home an hour afterward, looking like a bit out of a battle
picture, having tumbled through the roof of Farmer Bate's greenhouse
and killed a cactus, though totally unable to explain how I came to be
on the roof of Farmer Bate's greenhouse. They had much better have
left me alone, lost in "The Pirate's Lair!"

The artists in this land of which I dreamed left off painting
pictures, after hearing what the critics said, and purchased ladders,
and went off and painted houses.

Because, you see, this country of which I dreamed was not one of those
vulgar, ordinary countries, such as exist in the waking world, where
people let the critics talk as much as ever they like, and nobody pays
the slightest attention to what they say. Here, in this strange land,
the critics were taken seriously, and their advice followed.

As for the poets and sculptors, they were very soon shut up. The idea
of any educated person wanting to read modern poetry when he could
obtain Homer, or caring to look at any other statue while there was
still some of the Venus de Medicis left, was too absurd. Poets and
sculptors were only wasting their time

What new occupation they were recommended to adopt, I forget. Some
calling they knew nothing whatever about, and that they were totally