utable to the extraordinary predominance of his intelligence.
"To produce vital and useful criticism," he declares in his "Lowell," where he perhaps treats the subject more effectively because less abstractly—"to produce vital and useful criticism it is necessary to think, think, think, and then, when tired of thinking, to think more." This is doubtless quite true; and it explains the unpopularity of criticism among us, and its rareness. It also explains such unpopularity as Mr. Brownell has enjoyed with the Party of Nature. People do not like to think. People will do almost anything, within the law, to avoid thinking—such things, for example, as making card-indexes and compiling bibliographies and genealogies. But what people really like to do is to feel, to dream, to thrill with delight, or to be diverted with change. Mr. Brownell, nevertheless, relentlessly insists upon thinking. He thinks before he begins to write; each essay opens with a thought, another follows in the succeeding sentence, and so on incessantly to the end. There are no places to rest:—no biographical passages, no merely historical paragraphs, no gossip, scanty anecdotes, no personal digressions, few illustrative extracts from the authors under discussion. No; except one great exhilaration of which I shall speak in a moment, nothing but the steady, remorseless, brilliant business of critical characterization. It is a strain, like reading Meredith and Henry James, which people will not readily
