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EXPERIENCES AND MISTAKES
outspoken critic raises up against himself
a bod}' of hostile unprofessionals, princi-
pally of the more excitable sex, — strong
in numbers, too, if weak in brain, — to
whom he \s persona excessively ?ion g-rata,
simply because he has dispraised, or even
not sufficiently praised, their favorite per-
former. There is something deliciously
droll, and something rather touching, in
such partisanship, inasmuch as the allies
are, as a rule, strangers to the actor, who
is therefore the object of their distant and
purely disinterested cult, and also is usually
a player of no great reputation. There is
not a critic of a prominent daily newspaper
who does not occasionally note the scowl-
ing brows and basilisk glances of strangers
who detest him for his disparagement of
some one, — he can seldom guess whom.
Boston is of all large American cities the
one in which such cherishers of sentiment
are rife, because it is the most ebulliently
naive of all American cities in its passion
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