eminent philosopher seems to say "you find the poets, whom you
revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old age. Well! It
is very sad, and perhaps it would annoy me too, if I were not a
philosopher. But it only shows how right I was to tell, you not to
expect permanent relations behind the feeling of beauty, since all is
illusion, and there is no such thing as a principle of taste, but only
a variation of fashion."

Is it, however, quite so certain, after all, that there is no standard?
It must be admitted that there seems to be no fixed rule of taste, not
even a uniformity of practice or general tendency to agreement in
particular cases. But the whole study of the fine arts would lead to
despair if we allowed ourselves to accept this admission as implying
that no conceivable principle of taste exists. We may not be able to
produce it, like a yard-measure, and submit works of imagination to it,
once and for all, in the eyes of a consternated public. But when we
observe, as we must allow, that art is no better at one age than at
another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but
certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary
quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and
unattainable, a positive norm of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but
in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to
it. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and impossible exactly
to locate, yet revealed by the light it throws on distant portions of
the sky. At all events, it appears to me that this is the only theory by
which we can justify a continued interest in literature when it is
attacked, now on one side, now on another, by the vicissitudes of
fashion.

The essays which are here collected deal, for the most part, with
figures in the history of English literature which have suffered from
the changes of fortune and the instability of taste. In every case,
there has been something which is calculated to attract the sympathy and
interest of one who, like myself, has been closely concerned with two
distinct but not unrelated branches of his subject, the literary
character and the literary craft. More than fifty years have
passed--like a cloud, like a dream!--since I first saw my name printed
below a passage of critical opinion. How many reputations, within that
half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed!
We have