[165] him. Among authors, too, it was a time of defiant and vehement mutual criticism; it was thought a fine thing to impale somebody, to make somebody writhe, to get even with somebody, and it was hard for the younger men to keep clear of the flattering temptation. Poe in New York proceeded cheerfully with these tactics, and Lowell in Cambridge was only too ready to follow his example. In Lowell's Fable for critics you find the beginning of all this: in his prose you will find an essay on “Percival” which is essentially in the line of these English examples, and that on “Thoreau” is little better; and worse than either, perhaps, is his article on “Miltpn,” nine tenths of which is vehement and almost personal in its denunciation of Professor Masson, a man of the highest character and the most generous nature, though sometimes too generous of his words. What makes the matter worse is that Lowell charges the sin of “wearisomeness” upon both Masson and Milton himself, and yet the keen Fitz-Gerald selects one sentence of Lowell's in this very essay as an illustration of that same sin. Lowell says of Milton's prose tracts:--
Yet it must be confessed that, with the single exception of the Areopagitica, Milton's tracts are wearisome
