Colby, J: Agatha

Excerpt from Agatha: A Romance of Maine, in Blank Verse, With Other PoemsIT was at Lord Murray's table that Sydney Smith told me of the fun the Edinburgh reviewers used to make Of their work. I taxed him honestly with the mischief they had done by their ferocity and cruel levity at the outset. It was no small mischief to have silenced Mrs. Barbauld; and how much more utterance they may have prevented, there is no saying. It is all very well to talk sensibly now of the actual importance of reviews, and the real value of reviewers' judgments; but the fact remains that spirits were broken, hearts were sickened, and authorship was cruelly discouraged by the savage and reckless condemnations passed by the 'edinburgh Review' in its early days. 'we were savage,' replied Sydney Smith. 'i remember' (and it was plain that he could not help enjoying the remembrance) 'how Brougham and I sat trying one night how we could exasperate our cruelty to the utmost. We had got hold of a poor, nervous little vegetarian, who had put out a poor, silly little book; and when we had done our review of it, we sat trying' (and here he joined his finger and thumb as if dropping from a vial) 'to find one more chink, one more crevice, through which we might drop in one more drop.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.