Excerpt from Essays and Studies The truth on such matters, and on such only, as I can claim at least to have studied with the devotion of years to the utmost of what ability was in me. The convictions expressed are in any case my own, and due to the inspira tion of no party, no stranger, and no friend. My judg ment has been guided wholly by my sense of the service or the disservice done to art by the works or the Opinions on which I have taken occasion to remark. I have spoken but once or twice at the outside either of bad work or bad criticism, of folly or of falsehood, of ineptitude or of malignity my chief aim, as my chief pleasure, in all such studies as these has been rather to acknowledge and applaud what I found noble and precious than to scrutinize or to stigmatize what I might perceive to be worthless and base. It is not indeed always possible to show cause for our admiration of great men and their great work, and not seem in passing to stigmatize by implication the base work or the baser comments on other men's work of those who hate and covet the greatness which they can neither injure nor attain, the glory which they can neither diminish nor endure; to praise what is good in any kind is to dispraise what is bad, and every honour done to men worthy of honour is an insult to men who are powerless to confer it and hopeless to receive. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.