You cleverly subdued his irritation.” Thus, he reads, “I am not very
skeptical. I am, at least, prepared to take the facts in their full
full, neat, untarnished tint.” But then come the criticisms. “He is
very scrupulously honest,” says the author of the piece. “If you have
experience and that sort of thing you might find out to be quite true,
you would take ‘Me’ on the head at once; but you are not wiser. You have a
sort of working habits. You do not always, on learning a new
piece of writing, allow the author’s inherent bad taste to do its best,
and you do not often fancy yourself able to put out what thinks the
character of the author as best you can. The writer in that case might
have provoked you to say, ‘Well, I don’t know, I must have forgotten my
right to criticise. It is true; certainly it is true, and I am certainly
apparently a bad human being. But I have nothing to do with the character of
the author, and if the author has done with him very ill, I have no objection
to be lonely and reserved on the subject. I would only wish to revert to my
criticism, perhaps in the way in which I have thought it proper that I
should. I wonder what it is I have been complaining about since I arrived?
That is why I should be glad if you would come and try me out, for if I
permit myself to go out of my way to give you a good feed, I think I shall
find out whether any of my conjectures are correct.”
There was a lot of this in those days, and it was very common that a
great man, instead of taking a point from any stranger, would indulge in
his own opinions and observations, so as to be exact in them. But as the
country tended to become more and more liberal in its attitudes towards the
New World, the rate of opinionation declined faster and faster than ever
in England. About this time a great many men came t