e dismissed first. All the literature here discussed
is--with the exception of Crabbe's earliest poems, and the late
aftermath of Peacock and Borrow--work of one and the same period, the
first half of the present century. The authors criticised were all
contemporaries; with only one exception, if with one, they were all
writing more or less busily within a single decade, that of 1820 to
1830. And they have the further connection (which has at least the
reality of having been present to my mind in selecting them), that while
every one of them was a man of great literary power, hardly one has been
by general consent, or except by private crotchet would be, put among
the very greatest. They stand not far below, but distinctly below,
Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Yet again, they
agree in the fact that hardly one of them has yet been securely set in
the literary niche which is his due, all having been at some time either
unduly valued or unduly neglected, and one or two never having yet
received even due appreciation. The greatest of all critics was accused,
unjustly, of having a certain dislike of clear, undoubted supremacy. It
would be far more fair to say that Sainte-Beuve had eminently, what
perhaps all critics who are not mere carpers on the one hand, or mere
splashers of superlatives on the other, have more or less--an affection
for subjects possessing but qualified merit, and so giving to criticism
a certain additional interest in the task of placing and appraising
them.

This last sentence may not meet with universal assent, but it will bring
me conveniently to the second part of my subject. I should not have
republished these essays if I had not thought that, whatever may be
their faults (and a man who does not see the faults of his own writing
on revising it a second time for the press after an interval, must be
either a great genius or an intolerable fool), they possess a certain
unity of critical method. Nor should I have republished them if it had
seemed to me that this method was exactly identical with that of any
other critic of the present day in England. I have at least endeavoured
to wear my rue with a difference, and that not merely for the sake of
differing.

Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose work is not likely to be impeached for defect
either in form or in substance, wrote but a few months ago, in
melancholy mood, that the province of criticism appeared to be now
limited to the sayin