II.
We now have before us the more important, but also the more difficult, task of summing up the achievements and the shortcomings of the whole period covered by this volume—the only period, be it remembered, in which Criticism was regarded from the point of view of a commonly accepted, if not very commonly understood, orthodoxy. This of itself is an advantage, which, though it has not recently counted for very much, will never be overlooked by true critics. Even if we drop the quod semper, the quod ubique, quod ab omnibus has a weight which leaves it wholly for the other side to show case and cause against. Orthodoxy may be really right—really orthodox; on that head it has at least an even chance against any of its opponents. Even if it is not, it has merits which they can rarely claim. It has no temptations for the clever fool, who is perhaps on the whole the most pestilent, intellectually, of human beings. It demands a certain amount of self-abnegation, which is always a good thing. It does not perhaps really offer any greater temptation to the merely stupid than does the cheap heterodoxy of other times. Above all, it directly tends to a certain intellectual calmness—to an absence of fuss, and worry, and pother, which is certainly not one of the least characteristics of the Judge. At all times the wise man would rather be orthodox than not; and at most times, though not quite at all, the wisest men have been orthodox, if only because they have recognised that every opinion has some amount of truth in it, and that this truth, plus the advantages of orthodoxy just mentioned, is greatest, and should prevail.
This will be recognised by all fair-minded persons as a handsome allowance in any case; it is surely a particularly handsome allowance when the arbiter happens not to be a partisan of the orthodoxy in question. And it is quite sincere. The present writer has emerged from the serious and consecutive examination of “classical” critics, necessary for the writing of this volume, with a distinctly higher opinion of them generally, with a higher opinion in most cases in particular, than he held previously on piecemeal and imperfect acquaintance. It is only in such a case as that of Boileau—where an almost consummate faculty of expression masks really small critical gifts, and where the worst faults of the critical character, personal rudeness and spite, are continually lurking behind what seem to be systematic judgments—that the result of the reading has gone the other way. At the same time, if we take the true reading of illud Syrianum, “Judex damnatur [capitis cum [in]nocens [culpatur vel minime],” then the case of the criticism with which we have been dealing becomes somewhat parlous. It is all the worse because its worsening is gradual and continuous. The sins of the earliest Renaissance criticism are sins chiefly of neglect, and are not as a rule aggravated by commission; while its merits are very great. We could have done nothing without it: at best we should have had to do for ourselves all that it has done for us. But the bad side of the matter betrays itself in the code-making of the seventeenth century; it is but imperfectly and unsatisfactorily disguised in the compromises of the earlier eighteenth; and it appears in all its deformity in the La Harpian recrudescence.
The fault of the whole is undoubtedly but an aggravation of what in Ancient Criticism could hardly be called with justice a fault at all, though it was even there a serious defect—the absence, that is to say, of a wide enough collection of instances from the past, and of an elastic and tolerant system of trial and admission for the present and future. We may now[[746]] use the word “fault” almost without qualification, proviso, or apology. The Greek could not, and the Roman until very late days could only to a most limited extent, exercise the proper sweep of observation and comparison; the man of the earlier Middle Ages was, from different causes, prevented from doing so to any effect. But the contemporaries of Lilius Giraldus who knew (or knew of) Chaucer and Wyatt—still more, in the next generation, those of Patrizzi who knew Ronsard and the Pléiade—could plead no such exemption or excuse. They had recovered the exacter knowledge of the remoter past which the Middle Ages lacked, the critical spirit which during the Middle Ages was asleep: and they had accumulated and were accumulating treasures, of completed mediæval work and of modern work constantly accruing, enough to give them every comparison, without exception, that they could have wanted. Their guilt was deepening daily as their opportunities increased.
For they neglected these opportunities, they “sinned” these mercies, almost without exception. If England in any way deserved the good fortune that fell to her at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, it was because she had never wholly denied either Chaucer or Spenser, either Shakespeare or Milton. But the just men who thus saved her were wofully few, and they were almost all of them followers of Naaman, who extorted a permission to bow in the house of Rimmon, rather than of the glorious Three Children, who would do obeisance to no graven image that any king set up. If Germany had the honour of leading the way—or very nearly leading the way—in the Critical Reformation, it was because, from the very beginning of her really modern literature, she had put faith in her Heldenbuch and her Bergreihen. But even this faith was rather hesitating for a long time, and it had no foothold in courtly, and curial, and academic places. The men who were the real pioneers in the revival or commencement of that universal study of literature which alone can lead to a universal criticism, were as a rule mere scholars and antiquaries, men like Oldys and Capell, La Monnoye and Sainte-Palaye, Sanchez and Sedano. Gray, the greatest man of letters by far who at least fumbled with the key of the enchanted garden, did but fumble with that key: and his successors Percy and Warton, who opened what they could, were not great men of letters at all. Abroad, and especially in France, their analogues, such as Marmontel, never got so far even as they did. In Spain it became fashionable to deny Lope if not Cervantes: in Italy Dante-worship was too often, if not in most cases, lip-worship only.
The spectacle of these centuries is almost infinitely interesting and surprising. I cannot, after having, with not a little pains, attained to some Pisgah-sight of it, exhaust my own wonder, especially in regard to the Eighteenth, or disentangle myself from that fatalism which I have already—with the result of some misunderstanding in the house of no un-friends—announced at the end of the First volume. We can understand the Sixteenth century, with its vernaculars hardly yet fully formed, with their greatest literature coming and to come, with an almost excusable distaste for the immediate past, and with the full eagerness—the honeymoon intoxication—of their intercourse with the classics upon them—we can understand this being excessive in admitting, in continuing, in caricaturing, the critical principles of the classics themselves. We can also, if not quite so fully, understand how the dwindling enthusiasms of the Seventeenth, with its still greater sense of “the petty done, the undone vast” in the matter of mere erudition, and its thick-coming concerns of party politics, material progress, physical science, rivalry of nations, and the like—we can understand its sinking, in mid-journey or thereabouts, to an “age of prose and sense,” where the prose was as certain as the sense was sometimes problematical. But the Eighteenth was beginning to be disengaged, to specialise, to take stock, to disuse the Chronicle and begin the History. How, we must ask ourselves, could men like Muratori and Gravina, like Addison and Johnson, like Fontenelle and Du Bos, rest even partly satisfied (for wholly, as we have seen, some of them at least were not) with literary sealed patterns which admittedly would not fit the greatest admitted literature of all their respective countries except France, and which presented, to the not insufficient self-sufficiency of Frenchmen, the proposition that, for hundreds of years, French men of letters had been barbarians, if not idiots?
There is no explanation but Grandgousier’s, eked a little by the remembrance that—as we shall, it is to be hoped, see in the next volume—there was a searching of hearts, a moving of the waters, not very late, in fact very early, in the Eighteenth century itself. But, as we have seen already, the creed of the majority, the orthodoxy of the time, admitted no hint of this. It made a few concessions or extensions—till it found them obviously unsafe—in the direction of amiable but illogical compromise in particulars. It yielded up no jot of the general creed. It was still matter of breviary circa 1780, as it had begun to be circa 1580, that the Fable was the Poem (let us say that if Homer had written an argument of the Iliad, and had left off there, he would have done all that was actually necessary); that you must follow Nature by following the ancients; that you must not use epic verse in non-epic poetry, and so forth. In all countries, or almost all,—the extreme literary poverty and disarray of Germany here serving her in good stead,—these general assumptions, and the many others which have been noticed in the foregoing pages, had narrowed down to yet others of the particular kind—that the pause in an English verse must be absolutely within a syllable or two of the middle; that a French Alexandrine must not have the impudence to overflow into its neighbour; and the like. And the whole sums itself up all the more strikingly—because of the doubtful and argumentative tone of the passage—in that memorable decision of Johnson’s which has been discussed above, the decision justifying Rymer, justifying La Harpe, that we must not “judge by the event,”—that the presence of the fig is no proof of the nature of the fig-tree.
No very elaborate indications of the faults inseparable from this style of criticism can be necessary. That if carried out rigorously (as in some instances at least it was) it would simply have sterilised and petrified the literary production of the world, is of course obvious. That journey au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau, which, with whatever success or failure it may meet, however dangerous it may be in some high functions and departments of Life and Thought, is the motive principle of Art, was barred by it at once. It was no question of “progress” in the very likely chimerical sense of improvement; there was to be not even any difference. “To-morrow” was not, according to the proverb, to be “a new day”: if the men of this school did not go as far as Musette and pronounce that Demain, c’est une fatuité du calendrier, they held that it was to be as yesterday, and much more also. It is equally obvious that this doctrine positively invited indulgence in some of the worst faults of criticism. The critic who nowadays compasses all the reference shelves of the British Museum in order to find one discrepancy with his author, and then triumphs over him, is mostly confined to dates and names, or to more or less transparent erections of personal opinion (or personal ignorance) into standards, which the fairly intelligent reader takes for what they are worth. A hundred and fifty years ago the child of Momus had much better cards in his hand. The “exact scales of Bossu” were not only infinitely complicated and elaborate, but people in general, however intelligent, were by no means inclined to find any fault with them or question their justice. He had a hundred chances, to one that he now has, of catching his author tripping under statute, and without any actual garbling or dishonesty.
But between the dangers on the great scale and the dangers on the small, which have been indicated in the last paragraph, there were many of intermediate kinds. Without absolute distrust of novelty or unfamiliarity as such on the one hand, and without a mere peddling tendency to pick holes on the other, a critic under this dispensation might, and almost must, find himself distracted, hampered, wellnigh mantrapped, in his critical investigations. A dreamlike network or chain of obsessions was upon him. To submit himself frankly to the effect of the work and judge it as he would a prospect or a picture,[[747]] a vintage or a face, was forbidden him. It was his duty, in the first place, if the author openly classed his work in any Kind, to decide whether it really belonged to this or to another; if the author had omitted that ceremony, to determine the classification sedulously for himself. Then he had to remember, or look up, the most celebrated ancient examples of the Kind, or those modern ones which had obtained the credit of being most like the ancients; and to decide whether the resemblance was sufficient in general. And then he had to descend—if descent be possible in this process of grovelling—to particulars, and see if they were “according to Cocker.” If everything were entirely en règle, he was at liberty to admire and enjoy, supposing that, after the preliminaries, he had any disposition towards admiration and enjoyment left in him.
This is not a caricature; it is absolutely exact according to the “regulation” theory: and as the examples quoted before will have shown, and as hundreds of others might be produced to show, it is by no means untrue to practice. A critic, great, or generous, or happily both, might transcend his brief, be better than his creed, as in that noble eulogy of Gray’s Elegy which makes up for much in Johnson’s Life of the poet. But these were works of supererogation; and it is not quite certain that the exercise of them was entirely orthodox. The “stop-watch” was orthodox: it was the very centre and pulse of the machine of neo-classic criticism.
I do not think that it is part of my duty as a Historian to support this view by any further argument. I have given the strongest possible, in a minute, and I believe faithful, exposition of the actual survey, the actual opinions, the actual processes and judgments of neo-classic critics. If it is necessary to say any more, let it be this only. The weakness of their position is sufficiently shown by the fact that it could not bear the light of a historical knowledge of literature. There was none such, so long as it lasted: and when that light shone, it fell. The coincidences may not be causative; but it is for others to show that they are not.
If, however, any one should conclude from these strictures that, in the view of the present writer, the critical work of these three centuries was only evil continually, he would make a very great mistake. Moreover, putting all personal views out of the question, it is certain that this could not be the case. In almost all arts and even sciences, but in Art even more than in Science, the task set before the human faculties is a gigantic “Rule of False,” as the older arithmetic books called it, in which, by following out certain hypotheses, and ascertaining how and to what extent you are led wrong by them, you at last discover the right way. The most grotesque error is thus a benefit to Humanity, which, indeed, sometimes shows itself conscious enough of the beneficial character to perform the experiment over and over again. And further, in all arts and in all sciences, but especially in the higher division of Art, the reward of these excursions is not confined to the somewhat negative advantage of discovering that man need go that way no more. Corollaries and episodes—wayside windfalls of the Muses—await, not so thinly spread, the adventurous and single-hearted practitioner of Allegory as of Alchemy, on the acrostic as on the astrolabe. And considering the secondary or parasitic character which so specially belongs to Criticism, it is inevitable, not merely that these “bonuses,” these “extras,” should be more abundant here than anywhere else, but that the regular profits of the ordinary work should be considerable. Unless the critic is utterly incompetent and bad—unless he is a very Rymer, I do not say a Dennis, much less a Boileau—his mere contact with a new work of art must result in something useful, in a critical datum and fact for the future. It is very unlikely—if he is a person of even rather more than average brains it is practically impossible—that the exact equation or conjunction of his temperament, and his equipment, and the character of the work, will ever recur. It is, ex hypothesi, quite certain that it can never have occurred before. That he judges under a certain system, even a wrong one, will not detract from the value of the result, save in quantity. There will still be the actual fact—acquired to the stock of critical data for the future—that a critical power, say A, applied under the restrictions of system m or n, to work B, has resulted in the judgment x. And this result, in its own line and sphere, is as much a “thing,” and a thing of interest, to the critical student of literature, as a new beetle to the man of science, or a new judgment of the House of Lords to the man of law. Nay, to such a student it has a higher interest still: it is in rank and line (mutatis mutandis again) with the work criticised, with a picture, with a sonata, as a thing of art itself.
And critics in these centuries, from these points of view and others, estated criticism more richly than it could have hoped to be endowed when the Humanists began once more to attack and defend Poetry, or when Daniello a little later set himself down to write the first treatise of criticism proper in a vernacular language. They attempted, and to the best of their power arranged, the more general questions of the Art, always with zeal, if not always with discretion; they did valuable, if also somewhat and sometimes mistaken, work in its intermediate regions; and slowly, grudgingly, but surely, they set themselves to the apparently humbler but really fruitful work of actual critical examination of literature, at first as it had been provided and already criticised long ago, at last as it was being provided by the flying day. Their own theories, right or wrong, they worked out with altogether admirable patience and thoroughness, applying them, too, with a faithfulness which must excite admiration, if it cannot command agreement. And, as we have taken all fair pains to show, they not unfrequently strayed and stumbled upon outside truths, leant over the border of their somewhat narrow world and pried into others, after a fashion which, when the due time came, was sure to start more adventurous discoverers on wider paths of exploration.
It would be superfluous to extend this already long volume with any list of selected specimens of individual achievement and excellence. I hope, indeed, that this book may attract or help attention to some critics—Capriano, Cinthio, Patrizzi, Ogier are a very few examples—who are at present very little known: and to others, unnecessary to specify, whose claims have, as it seems to me, been underrated or misunderstood. But I have included, I think, no one of all the hundreds appearing in this volume who is not profitable in some way, for example, or for correction, or for reproof—who has not done something, if it be only in the way of warning, to help the student of all time.
We may also advantageously compare this balance-sheet with the balance-sheets of Ancient Criticism as given before, and of Modern in an anticipated draft. As compared with the former, Neo-Classicism has the disadvantage that, with at least equal if not greater narrowness, it is almost entirely destitute of the same excuse for being narrow. The Greeks of the great age wrote with nothing but Greek literature before them; those of the decadence and the Romans with nothing but Greek literature and Roman, which was for the most part a pale copy of Greek. The men of the eighteenth century, had they chosen, could have compared, with the practice and the theory of these two literatures, not merely the vast, the interesting, and, as “correcting” classicism, the inestimable literature of the Middle Ages, but at least four substantive and important literatures of modern times, those of France, Italy, England, and Spain. They not only did not do this as a matter of fact, but they invariably in practice, and not seldom as a matter of express theory, flouted and scouted the bare idea of doing it. They persisted in applying a travesty of the system of Horace, itself travestied from Aristotle, to these totally different products. Sometimes this resulted in the bland absurdity of the Battle of the Books attitude, sometimes in the hardly less ludicrous compromise which, by stretching the faults-and-beauties doctrine to its farthest possible extent, allowed critics to make room, as it were by sufferance, for Shakespeare and Milton, for Dante and Cervantes. They could laugh heartily at a dinner in the style of the ancients, and their common-sense would at once have pronounced any one fit for Bedlam who attempted to journey from London to York bareheaded, clothed in a toga, and with sandals on foot; but in theory, and even partly in practice, they imposed the classical uniform on literature.
Still, they show, at least in some respects, better beside their modern successors than it is the fashion to think. We have opened the road which they barred, and permitted the exploration of the countries which they forbade; but it is rather a question whether we have profited as we should by this gain. It is still the very rarest thing to find a critic who, by equipment or even by inclination, is himself disposed to take a really catholic view of literature; and those who do endeavour to take such a view are constantly regarded with distrust by the general, and with a rather comic rancour by specialists. It follows that the modern critic is, taking each on his own scheme, very much less well prepared as a rule than the critic, not merely of the eighteenth century, as has been said above, but of our period generally, and very nearly as liable as that critic was to take hasty sweeping views in condemnation of whole provinces of his subject.
Excesses, moreover, of this kind, which critics from the Renaissance onwards committed, are a natural result of reaction in all histories. And in the History of Literature a hundred years of something approaching to Anarchy are perhaps not too much to balance three hundred of mistakenly experimental Order. We shall see the causes and the faults, as well as the excuses and the gains, of the Anarchy later. For the present it is fitting to conclude, with an acknowledgment anew of the merits of the Order also, in respect to the faults of which we have been so frank. They are the merits of a remarkable industry, of a commendable freedom from mere dilettantism, of the discovery of not a few sound critical principles, and the registration of not a few sound critical judgments, of an experimentation and accomplishment which, even if it went wrong, serves as an invaluable warning to other ages not to pursue the paths which have so misled. And, yet once more, let us recognise that adjustment of criticism to creation—mysterious or simply natural as it may seem to different temperaments and different systems of thought—which we have observed before, in the cautious check of Renaissance criticism on the heady exuberance of the great Renaissance creation, in the support given by Seventeenth-century classicism to such mediate powers and dispositions as those of Corneille and even Racine, of Dryden and even Pope; in the salutary deterrence of Eighteenth-century orthodoxy, which saved us from more Beatties and more Anne Radcliffes when the time was not ready for Keatses or for Scotts. For so also in literature—and even in that, as some would have it, not divinest part of literature, Criticism—do all the works of the Lord, the lesser as well as the greater, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.
[711]. My copy is the Naples edition of 1732. But the book had appeared some four-and-twenty years earlier at Rome (some even quote a Roman ed. of 1704).
[712]. Leipsic, 1737.
[714]. Ed. cit., p. 12.
[715]. Ibid., p. 45.
[716]. He is very interesting on these, being the principal critic, between their own times and those modern days which have forgotten them, to deal with the subject.
[717]. Gravina calls the opposite style to Macaronic not, as most do, pedantesco, but Fidenziano, from Fidentio, the nom de guerre of Camillo Scrofa, author of certain egregious pedantesque pieces.
[718]. Modena, 1706.
[719]. Du Bos, a little later, with the apolausticism of the French eighteenth century, says bluntly (op. cit. sup., i. 275) that “the best poem is that which interests most,” and that “one hardly ever opens a poem for the sake of instruction.”
[720]. Istoria del Volgar Poesia, Roma, 1698 and later.
[721]. 7 vols. (Bologna and Milan, 1739-1752).
[722]. I shall own frankly that, when I first read this, I had either never heard of Arthur Kelton, or had utterly forgotten him, and thought the name must be a muddle of “Skelton.” What is known about him may be found in Warton, iv. 159, ed. Hazlitt (taken, as was probably Quadrio’s knowledge of him, from Wood and Bale), and also in the Dictionary of National Biography. According to the latter, his poem in praise of the Welsh nation is not now extant or discoverable; and though a Chronicle exists I have never seen it. What made the Jesuit name Kelton at all is as dark to me as what made him transform Gower and “Wicherley” into “Melic” bards.
[723]. If I have said nothing about this excellent Scoto-French disciple of Fénelon, author of the Voyages de Cyrus (which all good little eighteenth-century boys and girls read), and writer of French which was admitted by Frenchmen to be the best (except Hamilton’s) written by any non-Frenchman, it is neither from ignorance nor from outre-cuidance He takes place in criticism for a Discourse of Epic Poetry, prefixed to Télémaque.
[724]. It fills the greater part of the 12th and last vol. of the Paris ed. (1782). The passages quoted are at pp. 29, 30, and 57 of this.
[725]. For instance, of these four only Denina occurs in Dr Garnett’s excellent Short History of Italian Literature (London, 1898), and that for his historical, not his literary, work.
[726]. Huesca, 1692, 12mo.
[727]. Published at Saragossa, date as above. A later edition is said to be garbled.
[728]. Op. cit., p. 348.
[729]. Señor Menéndez y Pelayo, as cited before, in vols. 5 and 6 of his History.
[730]. P. 333.
[731]. This Gallicism was not universal. As Mr Ticknor (III. v., opening) says, while Moratin spoke contemptuously of the ballad of “Calaynos,” his opponent Huerta pronounced Athalie fit for nothing but its original purpose of being acted by schoolgirls.
[732]. One of the most important works of the Swiss school itself is Bodmer’s Sammlung Kritischer Schriften, 1741, but this is for another time. Nicolai’s Bibliothek der Schönen Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1757) and Literaturbriefe (ibid., 1759-66) perhaps show the movement best.
[733]. I did not think it worth while to mention Camusat in the French chapter, though he is not quite a contemptible person. He was one of the tribe of French men of letters who, for this reason or that, settled in Holland. He has the not small credit of being one of the first to attempt a Literary History (Amsterdam, 1722, 3 vols.) of France. He edited part of the literary contents of Chapelain’s letters, and did other things. But the Germans seem to have been particularly attracted by a Lettre sur les Poètes qui ont chanté la Volupté, which he wrote, I think, in connection with the work of Chaulieu, but which I have only read in German. It may have had, for them, the attraction of elegant naughtiness; but it has in reality very little either of the adjective or of the noun.
[734]. E.g., my friend Professor Elton, in his Augustan Ages (Edinburgh, 1899), p. 348. It is, I trust, not immoral, I am sure it is not illiberal, to edit a book without absolutely indorsing all its opinions, or insisting that all these opinions shall be one’s own.
[735]. My copy is the third edition, Leipsic, 1742. The first is, I think, of 1730.
[736]. Callières, a diplomatist and Academician, who wrote a good deal on various subjects, in his later years, has been referred to under Swift (p. 450). For more on him and his Histoire poétique de la guerre des A. et des M., v. Rigault, op. cit., pp. 213-217. As to Furetière, the agreeable author of the Roman Bourgeois seemed to me to lie too far outside any possible limits here, though, of course, there are critical touches in his work. Some might even reckon, as an important if rather excessive testimony to the rise of the novel, the curious picture of the girl Javotte—pretty but innocent to the verge of idiocy—turned into an accomplished and intelligent young lady by the mere reading of the Astrée. Furetière even defends this representation by serious argument (Roman Bourgeois, i. 171 sq., ed. Jannet, 2 vols., Paris, 1878).
[737]. This was James Ralph—the “Ralph to Cynthia howls” of Pope. It appeared in 1731, and deals with public amusements, from the theatre (which it defends from Prynne and Collier) to cock-fighting, auctions, and “Henley’s oratory.” It is rather amusing, and by no means, as Mr Pope calls its author, “wholly illiterate.”
[738]. It is notable that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics of the youngest school have been found Gottschedising in this sense, and proposing to judge the worth or worthlessness of criticism on similar cookery-book lines. I have seen an excellent critic rebuked by a reviewer for not “showing how to do something”—as if he were a dancing-master.
[739]. Gottsched, like a true Klassiker, dislikes and distrusts romance, ancient as well as modern, prose as well as verse, in and for itself. “Romance writers,” he says (at p. 167), “know as little of the rules of poetic imitation as of true morality.”
[740]. Thus we are to divide the Wonderful in Poetry (p. 171) into three parts—like omnis Gallia! One may hesitate whether to emend “three thousand” or “three million.”
[741]. He quotes a passage which he calls ein Muster des guten verblümten Ausdruckes.
[742]. In the 7th vol. (pp. 117-154) of his Works, 10 vols., Berne, 1774-75.
[743]. See The Misfortunes of Elphin.
[744]. I take these examples all from English merely to avoid confusion. The case in French is even clearer.
[745]. One word to guard against a possible supposition that the writer supposes Classicism dead. Nothing in literature dies: things only wane and wax, retire and come forward again. At this very moment there is even a sort of Classical reaction, which has shown itself in France for a long time and is showing itself in England now. When people are asking, not whether Old Mortality, and Vingt Ans Après, and Esmond, and Westward Ho! are good books, but whether the Historical novel is a good Kind,—when they argue, not that a play is decent, or sensible, or brilliant as literature, but that it is a “problem”-play, and therefore sacred—John Barleycorn is going to get up again, not to the surprise at all of historical students.
[747]. In judging pictures he would, indeed, have been almost equally liable to be “connoisseured out of his senses,” but the interference was less authoritative. Towards the end of the century the prophets of the Picturesque tried to invade prospects also with their preceptism: but Nature laughed at them too obviously.