ose styles which we call the Familiar, the
Picturesque, and the Intellectual. By recurring to this comparison we
can, without much difficulty, classify works of Fiction in their
proper order, and estimate the rank they should severally hold. The
Intellectual will probably never be the most widely popular for the
moment. He who prefers to study in this school must be prepared for much
depreciation, for its greatest excellences, even if he achieve them, are
not the most obvious to the many. In discussing, for instance, a modern
work, we hear it praised, perhaps, for some striking passage, some
prominent character; but when do we ever hear any comment on its harmony
of construction, on its fulness of design, on its ideal character,--on
its essentials, in short, as a work of art? What we hear most valued in
the picture, we often find the most neglected in the book,--namely, the
composition; and this, simply because in England painting is recognized
as an art, and estimated according to definite theories; but in
literature we judge from a taste never formed, from a thousand
prejudices and ignorant predilections. We do not yet comprehend that the
author is an artist, and that the true rules of art by which he should
be tested are precise and immutable. Hence the singular and fantastic
caprices of the popular opinion,--its exaggerations of praise or
censure, its passion and reaction. At one while, its solemn contempt for
Wordsworth; at another, its absurd idolatry. At one while we are stunned
by the noisy celebrity of Byron, at another we are calmly told that he
can scarcely be called a poet. Each of these variations in the public is
implicitly followed by the vulgar criticism; and as a few years back our
journals vied with each other in ridiculing Wordsworth for the faults
which he did not possess, they vie now with each other in eulogiums upon
the merits which he has never displayed.

These violent fluctuations betray both a public and a criticism utterly
unschooled in the elementary principles of literary art, and entitle the
humblest author to dispute the censure of the hour, while they ought to
render the greatest suspicious of its praise.

It is, then, in conformity, not with any presumptuous conviction of his
own superiority, but with his common experience and common-sense, that
every author who addresses an English audience in serious earnest is
permitted to feel that his final sentence rests not with the jury before