Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/74

 Their little hands were never made To tear each other's eyes."

Their little hands—can it be necessary to remind them?—were made to throw dirt and stones with impunity at passers-by of a different kind. This is their usual business, and they do it with a will; though (to drop metaphor for awhile) we may concede that English reviewers—and among them the reviewer of the Spectator"—have not always been unready to do accurate justice to the genuine worth of new American writers; among much poor patchwork of comic and serious stuff, which shared their welcome and diminished its worth, they have yet found some fit word of praise for the true pathos of Bret Harte, the true passion of Joaquin Miller. But the men really and naturally dear to them are the literators of Boston; truly, and in no good sense, the school of New England—Britannia pejor; a land of dissonant reverberations and distorted reflections from our own.