[1157]. Ed. cit., pp. 184-239.
[1158]. Unfortunately the readers of that very peculiar kind of literature the “County History” are not often critical students of literature itself: so the charm of this remark may be missed.
[1159]. This intolerance of things not quite “best and principal” was almost as much a tic with him as with Mr Arnold. I was once praising some recently printed Old French poems to him. “Are they better than Chrestien?” he said. And he would not read them.
[1160]. The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, chap. v.
[1161]. The poets Bryant and Whittier have respectable reputations as critics, and, from what I know of their other work, are likely to have deserved them. But on the same ground I rather doubt whether it is necessary to investigate their criticism for the present purpose. Nor do I think that the critical work of Bayard Taylor, of which I have some knowledge, imperatively calls for notice. American Shakespeare-critics (with Richard Grant White at their head) might occupy a special excursus, not without advantage.
[1162]. As, for instance, by Professor Brander Matthews, Introduction to American Literature (New York, 1896), p. 226.
[1163]. And she can sometimes be piquant. This of the Schlegels: “Men to find plausible meaning for the deepest enigma, or to hang up each map of literature, well painted and dotted, on its proper roller,” is quite inspiriting and tempts one to regret that she was thrown away on Transcendentalism and Italomania.
[1164]. One might add the question, “What has ‘Gentle George’ Etherege to do in this galley?” though he pulls a good oar in another.
[1165]. New York, 1883. The characteristics here noted appear also in the recently and handsomely produced book on the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare and his Forerunners, 2 vols., 1903. The much earlier Science of English Verse, 1880, attempts to explain prosody by musical signs, and is thus out of the pale.
[1166]. The expressions quoted and others will be found at pp. 169-183, op. cit. Lanier, though quite unprejudiced, I think, by nationality, was badly bitten by the equally fatal though less ignoble mania of “Progress,” and by the moral heresy. He shows the same marks as do so many pre-Arnoldian English critics of the mid-nineteenth century.