spite of Pope, that "a little learning is a useful thing," and that a little intelligence is even to be encouraged. For a hundred critical "salesmen" who will cheerfully undertake to communicate the emotion of great works of art, there are one or two who will attempt, beyond the most threadbare platitudes, to utter anything in the similitude of a thought; there are only one or two in a hundred who will jeopardize the favor of their audience or sacrifice their own mental ease to seek a reason for being "bored to extinction" by Pendennis, or for bursting into peans of enthusiasm and rage over the latest bit of pornography suppressed by the censor. There is, after all, a certain very human craving which finds its satisfaction in knowing the causes and reasons of things, and no one has discovered a method of satisfying this craving without effort. A criticism which practises discrimination and high differentiation, and which therefore demands and rewards close attention, a criticism which avowedly emphasizes rather the discipline than the delights of culture, is, as the physicians say, "indicated," and this, beyond all our other practitioners of the art, Mr. Brownell provides.
And, though he gives us charily the first fine careless rapture of the emotional response to letters, he does constantly mingle the pleasant with the useful in the delectable form which intelligence takes in its moments of surplus power—in the form, I mean, of wit. The superiority of Mr. Brownell's intelligence has enabled him to enjoy more of these
