is falsified here.  The criticism of the great Romantic period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors.  The philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind.  Two survivors of this great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that of De Quincey to incessant divergences of “rigmarole,” being formidable enemies to real critical competence.  The greatest prosemen —­not novelists—­of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay, were indeed both considerable critics.  But the shadow of death in the one case, the “shadow of Frederick” in the other, had cut short their critical careers:  and presumptuous as the statement may seem, it may be questioned whether either had been a great critic—­in criticism pure and simple—­of literature.

What is almost more important is that the average literary criticism of William IV.’s reign and of the first twenty years of her present Majesty’s was exceedingly bad.  At one side, of course, the work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict.  At the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great revolutionary struggle.  Between these the average critic, if not quite so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its general principles.  Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a favourite pen on the Times, and enjoying (I do not know with how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray’s Thunder and Small Beer has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very rudiments of criticism.  I do not know that even in the most interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same uncertainty and “wobbling” between the expression of unconnected and unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and form.