he had looked at the book, as you will remember, “Now I will dust his jacket.”  The standard of criticism does not lie with the individual in literature any more than it does in different periods as to fashions and manners.  The world is pretty well agreed, and always has been, as to the qualities that make a gentleman.  And yet there was a time when the vilest and perhaps the most contemptible man who ever occupied the English throne,—­and that is saying a great deal,—­George IV, was universally called the “First Gentleman of Europe.”  The reproach might be somewhat lightened by the fact that George was a foreigner, but for the wider fact that no person of English stock has been on the throne since Saxon Harold, the chosen and imposed rulers of England having been French, Welsh, Scotch, and Dutch, many of them being guiltless of the English language, and many of them also of the English middle-class morality.  The impartial old Wraxall, the memorialist of the times of George III, having described a noble as a gambler, a drunkard, a smuggler, an appropriator of public money, who always cheated his tradesmen, who was one and sometimes all of them together, and a profligate generally, commonly adds, “But he was a perfect gentleman.”  And yet there has always been a standard that excludes George IV from the rank of gentleman, as it excludes Tupper from the rank of poet.

The standard of literary judgment, then, is not in the individual,—­that is, in the taste and prejudice of the individual,—­any more than it is in the immediate contemporary opinion, which is always in flux and reflux from one extreme to another; but it is in certain immutable principles and qualities which have been slowly evolved during the long historic periods of literary criticism.  But how shall we ascertain what these principles are, so as to apply them to new circumstances and new creations, holding on to the essentials and disregarding contemporary tastes; prejudices, and appearances?  We all admit that certain pieces of literature have become classic; by general consent there is no dispute about them.  How they have become so we cannot exactly explain.  Some say by a mysterious settling of universal opinion, the operation of which cannot be exactly defined.  Others say that the highly developed critical judgment of a few persons, from time to time, has established forever what we agree to call masterpieces.  But this discussion is immaterial, since these supreme examples of literary excellence exist in all kinds of composition,—­poetry, fable, romance, ethical teaching, prophecy, interpretation, history, humor, satire, devotional flight into the spiritual and supernatural, everything in which the human mind has exercised itself,—­from the days of the Egyptian moralist and the Old Testament annalist and poet down to our scientific age.  These masterpieces exist from many periods and in many languages, and they all have qualities in common which have insured their persistence.  To discover what these qualities