UNIVERSITY REFORM.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2218, 5 April 1881, Page 3

UNIVERSITY REFORM.

To the Editor of the Globe. Sib, —I never realised more fully the prophetic instinct of a great writer than just now, when I was shown your poetical column of Saturday. Surely Hazlitt must have foreseen tho chorus of Lost Varsity Geniuses when he wrote the conclusion of his essay on criticism. Tho following are his words : “ Tho last sort I shall mention are verbal critics—mere word catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence, and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. (The title of Ultra-Oropidarian critics has been given to a variety of those species.) These erudite persons constantly find out by anticipation that you are deficient in the smallest things—that you cannot spell certain words, or join the nominative case and the verb together, because to do this is the height of their own ambition, and of course they must set you down lower than their opinion of themselves. They degrade by reducing you to their own standard of merit, for the qualification they deny you, or the faults they object to, are so very insignificant, that to prove yourself possessed of tho one or free from the other, is to make yourself doubly ridiculous. Littleness is their element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch. They creep, buzz, and flyblow. It is much easier to crush than to catch these troublesome insects; and when they are in your power, your selfrespect spares them. The race is almost extinct; one or two of them are sometimes seen crawling over the pages of the ” Yours, &0.,

A. W. BIOKBBTON. Antigua street South, April 4th, 1881.