terature, to understand it, unless by bracing itself to consider a
living art. Origins, roots, all the gropings towards light--let these be
granted as accessories; let those who search in them be granted all
honour, all respect. It is only when they preach or teach these
preliminaries, these accessories, to be more important than Literature
itself--it is only when they, owing all their excuse in life to the
established daylight, din upon us that the precedent darkness claims
precedence in honour, that one is driven to utter upon them this
dialogue, in monosyllables:

_And God said, 'Let there be light': and there was light.
'Oh, thank you, Sir,' said the Bat and the Owl; 'then we are off!'_

I grant you, Gentlemen, that there must always inhere a difficulty in
correlating for the purposes of a Tripos a study of Literature itself
with a study of these accessories; the thing itself being _naturally_ so
much more difficult: being so difficult indeed that (to take literary
criticism alone and leave for a moment the actual practice of writing
out of the question) though some of the first intellects in the
world--Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, Boileau, Dryden, Lessing, Goethe,
Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve--have broken into parcels of that territory, the
mass of it remains unexplored, and nobody as yet has found courage to
reduce the reports of these great explorers to any system; so that a very
eminent person indeed found it easy to write to me the other day, 'The
principles of Criticism? What are they? Who made them?' To this I could
only answer that I did not know Who made them; but that Aristotle,
Dryden, Lessing, had, as it was credibly reported, discovered five or, it
might be, six. And this difficulty of appraising literature absolutely
inheres in your study of it from the beginning. No one can have set a
General Paper on Literature and examined on it, setting it and marking
the written answers, alongside of papers about language, inflexions and
the rest, without having borne in upon him that _here_ the student finds
his difficulty. While in a paper set about inflexions, etc., a pupil with
a moderately retentive memory will easily obtain sixty or seventy per
cent. of the total marks, in a paper on the book or play considered
critically an examiner, even after setting his paper with a view to some
certain inferiority of average, has to be lenient before he can award
fifty, forty, or even thirty per cent. of the to