In a dictionary of this kind it is difficult to make a total clearance of _personality_: by which we mean that exhibition of peculiar opinion which is offensive to taste when it is shifted from the individual on the corporate book. The treatise of the known author may, as we have said, carry that author's controversies on its own shoulders: and even his crotchets, if we may use such a word. But { 293} the dictionary should not put itself into antagonism with general feeling, nor even with the feelings of classes. We refer particularly to the ordinary and editorial teaching of the article. If, indeed, the writer, being at issue with mankind, should confess the difference, and give abstract of his full grounds, the case is altered: the editor then, as it were, admits a correspondent to a statement of his own individual views. The dictionary portion of the Britannica is quite clear of any lapses on this point, so far as we know: the treatises and dissertations rest upon their authors. The Penny Cyclopædia was all but clear: and great need was there that it should have been so. The Useful Knowledge Society, starting on the principle of perfect neutrality in politics and religion, was obliged to keep strict watch against the entrance of all attempt even to look over the hedge. There were two--we believe only two--instances of what we have called personality. The first was in the article "Bunyan." It is worth while to extract all that is said--in an article of thirty lines--about a writer who is all but universally held to be the greatest master of allegory that ever wrote:
"His works were collected in two volumes, folio, 1736-7: among them 'The Pilgrim's Progress' has attained the greatest notoriety. If a judgment is to be formed of the merits of a book by the number of times it has been reprinted, and the many languages into which it has been translated, no production in English literature is superior to this coarse allegory. On a composition which has been extolled by Dr. Johnson, and which in our own times has received a very high critical opinion in its favor [probably Southey], it is hazardous to venture a disapproval, and we, perhaps, speak the opinion of a small minority when we confess that to us it appears to be mean, jejune and wearisome."