does to
architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific side of scholarship is
thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the aesthetic
side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent,
unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. With some honourable
exceptions, we find critics of literature too often divided into
linguists who seem neither to think nor to be capable of thinking of the
meaning or the melody, of the individual and technical mastery, of an
author, a book, or a passage, and into loose aesthetic rhetoricians who
will sometimes discourse on AEschylus without knowing a second aorist
from an Attic perfect, and pronounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil
without having the faintest idea whether there is or is not any
authority for _quamvis_ with one mood rather than another. Nor is it
possible to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two
parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly point to such
things as have here been quoted, while the extremists on the other feel
it a duty to pronounce phonetics the merest "hariolation," and a very
large part of what goes by the name of philology ingenious guesswork,
some of which may possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on
principles of sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is
not wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the
stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing the
province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser aesthetics
consider themselves entitled to neglect scholarship in any proper sense
with a similarly scornful indifference.

It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not come
now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, in that
history, they disappear as they appear. For the present purpose it is
more important to conclude this conclusion with a few general remarks on
the past, fewer on the present, and fewest of all on the future.

On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better than even
fewest; though something of the sort may be expected. Rash as prophecy
always is, it is never quite so rash as in literature; and though we can
sometimes, looking backward, say--perhaps even then with some
rashness--that such and such a change might or ought to have been
expected, it is very seldom that we can, when deprived of this
illegitimate advantage, vaticinate on such subjects