decriers

Updated: May 23, 2025

Maltravers had not yet, then, the keen and sharp yearning for reputation; he had not, as yet, tasted its sweets and bitters fatal draught, which /once/ tasted, begets too often an insatiable thirst! neither had he enemies and decriers whom he was desirous of abashing by merit. And that is a very ordinary cause for exertion in proud minds.

Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton - Ernest Maltravers — Volume 03

But the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen's method is a masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural to womankind.

George Saintsbury - A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)