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She had already written a considerable number of verses which had been printed, and were honored by being severely castigated by Gifford in the "Quarterly." "I didn't mind the great reviewer's blows at all," she used to say. "My poems had been republished in America; and Coleridge had prophesied that I should one day write a tragedy."
Under the reviewer's handling they made up admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss's regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose.
In the first place you will remark that this sentence, which contains the alleged contradiction, is mutilated; the part which is omitted, giving a directly contrary meaning to it, from that it bears under the reviewer's scissors." "It has some such appearance, I do confess."
"Had the Reviewer's object, in this instance, been to discover the truth, or had he known how to pursue it, it is perfectly clear, at first sight, that he would not have instituted a comparison between the prolificness which exists in the small towns he has alluded to, and that in certain districts, the population of which is made up, partly of rural inhabitants and partly of accumulations of people in immense masses, the prolificness of which, if he will allow me still the use of the phrase, is inversely as their magnitude; but he would have compared these small towns with the country places properly so called, and then again the different classes of towns with each other; this method would have led him to certain conclusions on the subject."
He hardly ever examines the state of mind of anyone less well-to-do than a younger son whose means only allow him to hunt two days in a week instead of six, and who has to rely on invitations for his shooting. These and their sisters, cousins, and aunts, apparently form the reviewer's entire world, and the only world in which there are any social phenomena worth discussion.
Darwin's variations are of the nature of "sport," i.e., rare, and owing to nothing that we can in the least assign to any known cause, the reviewer's objections carry much weight. Against the view here advocated, they are powerless.
It is a story within whose implications lies all that has ever been said, or ever will be said, about censorship. The copy-readers and make-up men, it seems, could see nothing especially infamous in their reviewer's little simile. As poor George Sampson said of the outraged Mrs. Wilfer's under-petticoat: "We know it's there."
And, in the palmy days of circulating libraries, the price given by second-hand booksellers for novels made a very considerable addition to the reviewer's remuneration or guerdon. But these booksellers would not pay, in proportion, for two or one volume books alleging, what no doubt was true, that the libraries had a lower tariff for them.
It will happily illustrate the peculiar difficulties that beset liturgical revision to close this resume of the censures of The Church Times by printing, side by side, the reviewer's estimate of the changes proposed in the Confirmation Office and the independent judgment of a learned evangelical divine of our own Church upon the same point.
And this shows one of two things either that the Quarterly Reviewer's notions of probability are peculiar to himself, or that he has such an overpowering faith in the truth of evolution that no extent of structural break between one animal and another is sufficient to destroy his conviction that evolution has taken place. But this by the way.
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