The doctor knows that although his position in the literary and political world is appreciated well enough, only here and there a man has thought it worth while to express an accurate opinion about him. . . . Of course I have occasionally said what occurred to me in relation to his jejune style of lecturing and writing; but I have been on the whole reticent, for excellent reasons, concerning this aspect of the case. “What’s done he partly may compute,” but he can never know what I have “resisted.” . . . The diffusion of the alphabet and of what is called popular intelligence, has compelled the advent of a class of men, not literary men in a proper sense of the word, but men who are able to put the 26 letters into new and often into grammatical forms of prose and verse. Holland is one of these men; the Country Parson another; Tupper another. There are thousands of them. They are embalmed in Allibone, who takes notice of everything that gets between pasteboard covers, but they have no part in literature. It is no use to say in reply to this that there is no accounting for tastes, and that if a man or a woman says he thinks Dr Holland a better essayist than Higginson or a greater poet than Lowell, he has a right to his opinion. A man is at liberty to prefer Browning to Tennyson, for instance, or George Eliot to Thackeray. So a man may say he prefers Holland to Gail Hamilton, or vice versa. But the preference must be within or without the lines of recognized literary excellence or else criticism and comparison go for nothing. (William Stevens Robinson)