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.