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"Henceforth," says the reviewer, "... he may slander a few more eminent characters, he may go on to deride venerable and holy institutions, he may stir up more discontent and sedition, but he will have no peace of mind within ... he will live and die unhonoured in his own generation, and, for his own sake it is to be hoped, moulder unknown in those which are to follow."
As for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it.
Certainly a member of Parliament is not sure that he shall not be torn in pieces by a mob, or guillotined by a revolutionary tribunal for his opposition to reform. Nor is the Westminster Reviewer sure that he shall not be hanged for writing in favour of universal suffrage. We may have democratical massacres. We may also have aristocratical proscriptions.
If the unhappy creatures she bore beneath her hatches, should have been landed in any other part of the then called Christian or civilized world, stigmatized with the charge of witchcraft, they would have met with the halter or the fagot; and scarcely have fared better, if cast upon any savage shore. We have seen how our Reviewer makes, let us now see how he unmakes, history.
The novel was declared, and not unjustly, to be "very hastily, and in many places very unskilfully, written." The Scotch was decried as "unintelligible" dialect by the very reviewer who had accused "Marmion" of not being Scotch enough. But the "Edinburgh" applauded "the extraordinary fidelity and felicity" with which all the inferior agents in the story are represented.
Shut out from the law, he turned to literature, and became a regular reviewer. There was not so much reviewing then as there is now, but it was better paid. His services were soon in great request, for he wrote an incomparable style. The origin of Froude's style is not obscure. Too original to be an imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman.
Art is revolutionary, like everything else in these times, when Treason itself, in the form of a hoary apostate and reviewer of contemporary fiction, glares from the walls, and is painted by Royal mark ROYAL! Academicians! . . . From Thomas Potts, Esq., of the "Newcome Independent," to S. Gandish, Esq. Newcome, May 3.
I know the editor of literary pages that go far and wide, who has held down that job now for over a year. That man is troubled: none has ever stood in his shoes for much longer than that. "Don't fool yourself," I heard a successful young journalist say the other day to a very conscientious young reviewer. "Good work won't get you anything. Play politics, office politics all the while."
"Seldom," wrote the reviewer, "has it been our good fortune to meet with as perfect a piece of work as James Brown Ducey's 'The American Clergyman in the Early Twentieth Century. The book consists of exactly half a hundred biographies of eminent churchmen; in these fifty brief sketches is mirrored faithfully the entire religious life, external and internal, of the American people eighty or ninety years ago.
The Edinburgh reviewer of the Scotsman pompously declared that such a book could do no good. To-day both the Press and the public have made ample if belated amends for the unjust treatment meted out to the “Anglo-German Problem” on its first appearance.
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