independent of us, eternal and divine, we must search into them as we would into any other set of facts, in nature, or the Bible, by patient induction.  We must not be content with any traditional maxims, or abstract rules, such as have been put forth in Blair and Lord Kaimes, for these are merely worked out by the head, and can give us no insight into the magic which touches the heart.  All abstract rules of criticism, indeed, are very barren.  We may read whole folios of them without getting one step farther than we were at first, viz. that what is beautiful is beautiful.  Indeed, these abstract rules generally tend to narrow our notions of what is beautiful, in their attempt to explain spiritual things by the carnal understanding.  All they do is to explain them away, and so those who depend on them are tempted to deny the beauty of every thing which cannot be thus analysed and explained away, according to the established rule and method.  I shall have to point out this again to you, when we come to speak of the Pope and Johnson school of critics, and the way in which they wrote whole folios on Shakespeare, without ever penetrating a single step deeper towards the secret of his sublimity.  It was just this idolatry of abstract rules which made Johnson call Bishop Percy’s invaluable collection of ancient ballads “stuff and nonsense.”  It was this which made Voltaire talk of “Hamlet” as the ravings of a drunken savage, because forsooth it could not be crammed into the artificial rules of French tragedy.  It is this which, even at this day, makes some men of highly-cultivated taste declare that they can see no poetry in the writings of Mr. Tennyson; the cause, little as they are aware of it, simply being that neither his excellences nor his faults are after the model of the Etonian classical school which reigned in England fifty years ago.  When these critics speak of that with which they sympathise they are admirable.  They become childish only when they resolve to bind all by maxims which may suit themselves.

We must then, I think, absolutely eschew any abstract rules as starting-points.  What rules we may require, we must neither borrow nor invent, but discover, during the course of our reading.  We must take passages whose power and beauty is universally acknowledged, and try by reverently and patiently dissecting them to see into the secret of their charm, to see why and how they are the best possible expressions of the author’s mind.  Then for the wider laws of art, we may proceed to examine whole works, single elegies, essays, and dramas.