Strayed Sympathies by Agnes Repplier — Read

It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices. -- ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

It is not only more instructive -- it is more enlivening. The conventionalities of criticism (moral, not literary, criticism) pass from mouth to mouth, and from pen to pen, until the iterations of the press are crystallized in encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. And from such verdicts there is no appeal. Their laboured impartiality, their systematic adjustments, their careful avoidance of intuition, produce in the public mind a level sameness of misunderstanding. Many sensible people think this a good result. Even a man who did his own thinking, and maintained his own intellectual free-hold, like Mr. Bagehot, knew and upheld the value of ruts. He was well aware how far a little intelligence can be made to go, unless it aspires to originality. Therefore he grumbled at the paradoxes which were somewhat of a novelty in his day, but which are out-worn in ours, at the making over of virtue into vice, and of vice into something more inspiriting than virtue. "We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies on Henry the Eighth, devotional exercises to Cromwell, and fulsome adulations of the first Napoleon."