admission which certainly will be brought. It is
possible that for some tastes even this chapter may not contain enough
of _Tendenz_-discussion, that they may miss the broader sweeps and more
confident generalisations of another school of criticism. But the old
objection to fighting with armour which you have not proved has always
seemed a sound one, and has seldom failed to be justified of those who
set it at nought. Careful arrangement of detail and premiss, cautious
drawing of conclusions, and constant subjection of these conclusions to
that process of literary comparison which I believe to be the strongest,
the safest, the best engine of literary criticism altogether--these are
the things which I have endeavoured to observe here. It might have shown
greater strength of mind to reject a large number of the authors here
named, and so bring the matter into case for more extended treatment of
interesting individuals. But there is something, as it seems to me, a
little presumptuous in a too peremptory anticipation of the operations
of Time the Scavenger. The critic may pretty well foresee the operations
of the wallet-bearer, but he is not to dictate to him the particular
"alms for oblivion" which he shall give. As it used to be the custom for
a dramatic author, even though damned, to have his entrees at the
theatre, so those who have once made an actual figure on the literary
stage are entitled, until some considerable time has elapsed, to
book-room. They lose it gradually and almost automatically; and as I
have left out many writers of the end of last century whom, if I had
been writing sixty years since, I should doubtless have put in, many of
the first half of it whom I should have admitted if I had been writing
thirty years since, so in another generation others will no doubt
exercise a similar thinning on my own passed or pressed men.

But few, however, I think, appear here without more or less right of
admission to the mind-map of the century's literature which a
well-furnished mind should at this moment contain. That such a mind-map,
quite irrespective of examinations and lecture-courses, and of literary
bread-study generally, is a valuable thing, I have no doubt. And I
think, without wishing to magnify mine office, that the general
possession of it might do something to counteract these disastrous
influences which have been referred to a little earlier. A man should
surely be a little less apt to take the pinchbec