For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation? - John Campbell Shairp

Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye but the child's heart that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the Gospel.

So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger.

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimate of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.