dismal little swamp the stream flows between two flat banks with many a winding. Daylight is fading fast now; a white mist begins to rise, and great white moths flit, like ghosts, along the waterside. Not altogether a pleasant place to walk at dewy eve. But these few hundred yards of boggy stream have yielded me many a fish ere now.

My friend has come down the crossside and joined me. He has made but one addition to his bag since we parted, and is inclined to be despondent. He will fish no more, but saunters along the opposite bank, watching my ope

rations.

For some time the rod is plied in vain, and my friend, who has found more than one soft place, shows signs of turning tail. But I pick my way on to a little cape of firm ground, around which the stream sweeps with a strong current. Once more my fingers thrill to the electric twitch, and I swing a game troutling of some four ounces deftly on to the bank. In the next twenty yards another and yet another come to grass.

Then the watcher, roused to emulation, sets to work once more. But the ground gets worse and worse, and, thanks to the failing light, I have fathomed one moss-hole to the knee. There is a shout of triumph! My comrade has a fish, a good one doubtless, for his rod is bending double. But hapless wight, that careless step bewrays him! One mighty flounder, and he lies prone upon the moist earth. The point of his rod clutched in a convulsive grasp, flies upward as he falls, and he rises, mud-bedaubed, a sad and wrathful man, while his fish escapes with the hook and a yard of gut. Just one more cast with a new bait, my friend, and we will leave the treacherous spot, for we are a good

half-mile from the house, and shall scarce get back by daylight.

I lay my rod aside and, taking good heed to my steps, pursue a large moth, fluttering about hard by. He is soon caught, and fixed tenderly on the hook. Now to find a fitting place to essay his charms. Here is the very spot. Where that ancient alder, with roots thick grown with moss and fungi, flings its straggling branches over the slow sullen stream, eating its silent way through the rich, black crumbling earth.

Lightly the moth falls on the dark water and glides slowly down the sluggish stream. Its gossamer wings are soon draggled, and it begins to sink. I am on the point of taking it out, and seeking a fresh victim, when suddenly the calm surface is broken by a rise the trailing line grows taut. A few convulsive struggles, and my fish is handsomely landed on the low, bare bank. He has taken the colour of his dwelling-place; dusky and dull of hue, he cannot compare in beauty with his brethren outside the spinney. But he is a gallant fish for all that, and, if my eye deceives me not, a good three-quarters of a pound.

Right loth am I now to quit the stream, though night is falling fast. But I tear myself away, regain the side, and we start at score upon our homeward trudge. The moon is rising, a crescent of pale gold, as we cross the park. Shapeless and dim in the twilight the great trees tower aloft like giant spectres. A late-feeding hare. lurches leisurely away from our path; a bat almost brushes my cheek, as he flits by on noiseless wing. But no sound comes to break the solemn stillness of a world that seems mourning for the day that is dead.

IT was Gray's opinion that a bad verse was a better thing than the best observation made upon it. The opinion is valuable, for Gray not only lives with the poets; he is in the very front rank of critics, though he published no criticisms. On the other hand, Johnson, who published much acute and just criticism, with much also that was foolish and ill-tempered, thought more nobly of the critical soul. To refine the public taste, he said, was a public benefaction, and so far no one probably will disagree with him. “If bad writers were to pass under no reprehension ", he asked, "what should restrain them?" And again: "All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment". That again is not to be gainsaid, but there is clearly much virtue in the when. The truth is that the Court of Criticism has no legal existence. It is a self-appointed tribunal working on no settled principles and bound by no precedents. Any one may practise in it. "Criticism", observes Dick Minim's biographer, "is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may by mere labour be obtained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a Critic". In this court no one conceives himself obliged either by courtesy or custom to respect, much less to uphold the decision of his brother, be he never so learned. Freedom is of course a blessed thing,

but too much freedom is not always good for every man, and its result in this instance is not seldom as ridiculous as it is confusing. The

critic is indeed not so much a baron of the Middle Ages exercising power of life and death over his own feudatories, as a robber-chief levying war wherever he feels himself strong enough to do so with impunity, on his neighbour robbers as well as on the defence

less peasantry. Or if this simile be thought too robust for him, let him be likened to the pariah dog of the East, which turns upon its fellow beast when better prey cannot be had.

It is little wonder that a stand should have been sometimes made against this tyranny; the wonder rather is that it should not have been more often made. It is true that upon bad writers only will censure have much effect, yet it is only half a truth. Censure will not harm good work, but it may give the workman many an uncomfortable hour. Pope, the most sensitive, and Scott, the most sensible of writers, were both annoyed by censure; yet upon their writings censure has not had much effect. And after all how small a part of the irritable race can even this half-truth avail to console! It is only natural, then, that in an age when the Passion of the Past has ceased to work, or at most lingers only in a few withered breasts themselves soon to become candidates for its regard, when scorn of the beliefs and sentiments, the institutions and practices of its fathers is considered the first necessity of noble mind, when he who

From the shadow of the globe would sweep

into the younger day,

must ply his broom ruthlessly-at such a time it is, we say, but natural that

the divinity which once hedged round a critic should have gone the way of all other divinities. It is the age of æsthetical democracy as of political, and critics like kings must be taught to "ken there is a lith in their necks". The spectacle of another Byron paying compliments to another Gifford as the "monarch-maker in poetry", can be hardly more unlikely than-than the advent, shall we say, of another Byron? "Sire," said the French courtier to his king, when the Bastille was toppling down in flames that are not yet quenched, "Sire, this is not a revolt, but a revolution." Many a revolt has been headed against the critic's rule, and not always unsuccessfully; now there is a revolution, and a revolution by course of law. A second Daniel has come to judgment, and henceforth it is law in English land that the public good must not be benefited at the expense of the private individual.

To the ordinary lay mind, which has always found it hard to draw the necessary distinction between common law and common sense, this judgment has an almost boundless significance. Stretching far beyond the province of mere æsthetic criticism, it appears to embrace almost the whole social fabric, -and not to embrace it only, but to strike at its very core. Something of the same theory was indeed broached by that large-hearted senator who confided to an appreciative audience that they were not bound to obey the law beyond their own convenience. But between the interpretation of the law by an irresponsible member of Parliament and the law itself there is sometimes much difference. This member was in very truth no better than a critic, and, had any sufferer by his criticism chosen to seek redress, would probably have shared the critic's shrift. But if this interpretation of the law by one of its chief officers is to hold good, surely the end of all things is at hand. For what may it not involve? Take one instance, -a simple one, within universal comprehension. The policeman is not he maintained

for the benefit of the public good? Yet how often must he justify his maintenance at the expense of the private individual! There must be many private individuals who would gladly see those uncompromising and incorruptible critics, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Monro, laid by the heels for preserving the public good at their expense; and really, if what is to be sauce for the æsthetic goose is also to be sauce for the political gander, it is hard to see why their wish should not be gratified. To take another instance, which will touch the law-abiding Briton on his tenderest side; it is for the public good that we should have an Army, a Navy, Ministers of the Crown, even Judges; they can only be maintained at the expense of the private individual,—of the tax-payer, to wit. But these are matters too high for our dim layman's vision. Allegorically blind herself, Justice is often the cause of literal blindness in others who seek to penetrate her mysteries with unanointed eyes. In the presence of this inscrutable goddess we can but murmur to ourselves those touching lines which Mr. Clayden has reminded us were written by Samuel Rogers:

They who watch by her, see not; but she

sees,

Sees and exults-were ever dreams like these!

There are, however, other sides of the question on which it may be possible for a layman to reflect with less chance of foolishness, and which are perhaps of more general interest to those good souls who would gladly obey the law in all things, when assured of understanding her commandments.

The particular occasion of this judg ment was what is known in legal society as a theatrical case. There has been more than one such lately, and in each the aggrieved party contrived to secure not only the sympathy of the judge, but the more practical sympathy of the jury as well. Without entering into particulars, which might be tedious, it may be broadly said that

in each case the judge laid it down that adverse criticism within certain bounds was fair, and in each the jury decided that these bounds had been passed. It was in the last of thesein which the proprietor of a musichall had sued the proprietor of a newspaper for publishing reflections on the morality of his entertainment—that this distinction was drawn between the public interests and the rights of the private individual.

The precise legal interpretation of the word private puzzles us at the outset. In his relation to the State every individual is in one sense private. The public good is the good of the State, and the State is a mighty sum made up of many myriads of units. Yet surely no individual can plead the privileges of privacy who comes forward in person to solicit the suffrages of the public. The artist, in whatever form of art he works, who earns his living by his skill, is from a purely commercial point of view as much a tradesman and stands on the same footing as the greengrocer or the hosier. Both are ready to supply certain goods for a certain price; the question between them and the public is whether the goods are worth the price asked for them. Whether the goods be pictures or potatoes, socks or sonnets, matters nothing so far as the essential terms of the bargain are concerned; but a court of law takes cognizance of the greengrocer's failure to supply a proper quality of potato, whereas the defaulting artist is tried in the court of criticism. The critic is, in short, an inspector of æsthetic weights and measures, or we may call him a sanitary inspector, if we please, or an inspector of nuisances. His misfortune is that he has no official standing; he has appointed himself, at his own peril. Artist and greengrocer are both private individuals up to a certain point, and as such have rights common to every human being in a civilized state of society. Their customers are concerned only with the quality of their wares; with the greengrocer's

religious opinions the public has no more to do than with the moral character of the poet's grandmother or his own relations to the tax-collector. Moreover the artist has certain sentimental rights, as they may be called, peculiar not to the individual but to the artist. Good art has a glory of its own, supreme and imperishable; bad art, when it offends no moral law, is not a crime against society. It may provoke us by its folly, or weary us by its insipidity; but it is not to be treated with the severity due to him who violates the laws of social order or endangers human life. So far it is right to say that criticism must not perform its office of purifying public taste at the expense of the individual; but when an artist voluntarily submits his work to the tribunal of public opinion, it is idle to warn that tribunal that it must pronounce no sentence likely to hurt the interests of the private individual. Johnson, somewhat brutally, observes that "the diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations". It is more lawful, he says, than the diversion of teasing other animals, "because for the most part he comes voluntarily to the stake". It is at any rate certain that the practice of criticism is of venerable antiquity, and that the public has never considered the man who tries to sell a bad picture or a bad book exempt from censure on the ground that he is a private individual.

In the mind of the law the whole question seems to turn on what constitutes fair criticism. In an action for libel brought by a bookseller who had been accused of selling immoral and foolish books Lord Ellenborough delivered himself of this judgment: "Liberty of criticism must be allowed, or we should have neither purity of taste nor of morals. Fair discussion is essentially necessary to the truth of history and the advancement of science. That publication, therefore, I shall never consider as a libel which has for its object not to injure the reputation of any individual, but to cancel mis

representation of fact, to refute sophistical reasoning, to expose a vicious taste in literature, or to censure what is hostile to morality." From the antithesis of the last sentence it would seem that the learned judge used the word vicious in an æsthetic sense, and if this be so his ruling goes far; but then comes across our path the "reputation of the individual". A badly written or foolish book is æsthetically vicious, and its exposure should therefore tend to the purification of taste. Yet the exposure must also inevitably tend to injure the artistic reputation of its writer. It must in short be obvious that there can be no adverse criticism, provided of course it be true, which does not injure the reputation of the individual against whom it is directed, and, so far as it is designed to warn the public that the work offered to them for purchase is not worth their money, is not intended to injure it. It is in a word impossible entirely to separate the individual from his work. The individual lives by the sale of his work; if that sale be injured, the individual is injured.

This separation of the artist from his work is more impossible, it may be observed, in theatrical criticism than in any other. This department of criticism appears indeed to be governed by certain laws of its own, whose motives it is not easy to fathom,— unless we agree with those who maintain that they may be fathomed much too easily. To the uninitiated it seems at any rate as though it were often content to accept an actor for some other sake than his work's. But we have neither the right nor the wish to go behind the scenes. It is, however, certain that in criticizing the performance of an actor you must more or less consciously criticize his physical capabilities for the part, which are in fact-though it is a fact which seems to be strangely overlooked-threefourths of his qualifications. It must be obvious that an actor with a harsh voice, an awkward manner, and an ungainly figure, whatever his intellec

tual powers may be, can never satisfactorily present characters associated with the idea of personal charm, such as Romeo or Prince Hal or Charles Surface. In only one of the three cases aforesaid was the plaintiff an actor; but the British juryman, with all his good qualities, is not a very nice reasoner, and we suspect that in what is vaguely known as a theatrical case the critic will very rarely get the benefit of the doubt. Of all professions an actor's stands in the closest personal relation to the individual; adverse criticism seems as it were to strike at

the very man himself. We must remember, too, that our theatre gives a great degree of pleasure, and on the whole of innocent pleasure, to an immense number of persons whose æsthetic senses are not likely to be very seriously offended by the defects which annoy a critic. It must be obvious that an infinitesimal proportion of the crowds which throng our playhouses can carry a critical mind with them, fortunately for them as well as for the playhouses; and the jury who cast a theatrical critic in damages are pretty sure to have the public on their side. The conscientious criticism of one's contemporaries must always be a sufficiently thankless task, and can rarely be an agreeable one. But the critic of the theatre has the hardest lot of all; and that editor of The Times was, we suspect, right who warned his critic that it was not worth their while to take the theatre too seriously. Assuredly the critic was wise in his generation who accepted the warning.

If baiting authors has been always a recognized pastime, the critics in their turn have not gone free.

Such shameless bards we have; and yet 'tis true,

There are as mad abandoned critics too.

From Horace to Matthew Arnold, all have had a fling at them, and they can hardly be said to have had the best of the game. The world has never been sorry to see a critic caught on the hip; partly