But its inadequate reviews of current fiction add nothing to its value, and its habitual tone of condescending depreciation in treating imaginative literature of indigenous origin is one of the strongest discouragements to literary production.
The main value of good criticism lies in its readiness and penetration in discovering and applauding merit not before recognized, or imperfectly recognized.

This is a conspicuous trait of Sainte-Beuve, the greatest of all newspaper critics.

He knew how to be severe upon occasion, but he saw talent in advance of the public and dispensed encouragement heartily, so that he made himself almost a foster-father to the literature of his generation in France.

But there is a class of anonymous reviewers in England and America who seem to hold a traditional theory that the function of a critic toward new-born talent is analogous to that of Pharaoh toward the infant Jewish population[1].
During the first year after its publication "The Hoosier School-Master" was translated into French and published in a condensed form in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.

The translator was the writer who signs the name M.Th.Bentzon, and who is well known to be Madame Blanc.