336 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



Wilson nor the malignity and retrogressive bigotry of his editor in 

 chief. (3) The Establishment of Romantic Criticism. First, Bowles, 

 whose criticism of Pope's poetry, prefixed to his edition of that 

 poet's works, 1806, gave rise to the controversy with Campbell and 

 Byron (Campbell's Essay on Poetry, 1819; Byron's Letter to John 

 Murray, and Observations upon Observations, 1821; Bowles's In- 

 variable Principles of Poetry, 1819, and Letters to Byron and Campbell, 

 1822). Second, Coleridge, who, in his treatment of the progress of 

 the English drama, states the comparative method excellently and 

 attempts to put it into practice. Though his criticism was destined 

 to germinate and bear fruit in younger writers, it was in itself a dis- 

 appointment. Vague, a priori, unapplied, it fails because the specu- 

 lations which inspired him speculations of Lessing, Kant, Schelling, 

 Schiller, and especially of Jean Paul were not systematized by 

 him; because, also, the principles were not drawn by him from the 

 practice and history of poetry, nor scientifically tested by the social 

 and poetic practice of the day. (Lectures on English Poets, 1808, 

 1812; Biographia Literaria, 1817.) Third, Campbell (Lectures on 

 Poetry, 1810; Specimens of the British Poets, 1819^18). Fourth, 

 Leigh Hunt, in criticism a direct descendant of the Wartons and 

 Spence, in temperament, of Goldsmith; he in turn influenced his 

 contemporaries Hazlitt and Lamb, and probably both Carlyle and 

 Macaulay, the leaders of criticism in the next generation (Critical 

 Essays, 1805; What is Poetry ? 1844; Wit and Humor, etc.). Fifth, 

 Charles Lamb, unique in sympathetic insight, a forerunner of Pater. 

 Sixth, William Hazlitt, the ally of Coleridge in the contention that 

 poetry should be judged not by some standard of the critics, but by 

 the criterion of poetry poetry universal and in the abstract (Round 

 Table, 1817; Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817; English Poets, 

 1818; English Comic Writers, 1819; Dramatic Literature of the Reign 

 of Elizabeth, 1821; Table Talk, 1821-22). Seventh, Shelley, whose 

 Defence of Poetry, 1821, provoked by T. L. Peacock's Four Ages of 

 Poetry, recalls the best of Sidney, Bacon, Wordsworth, and Coleridge 

 and anticipates Carlyle 's gospel of poetic significance and Pater's 

 of rational aesthetic delight. 



3. The next stage in the development of literary science is marked 

 first by various attempts at an Historical Method. These began with 

 Henry Hallam, and were continued by Carlyle, De Quincey, and 

 Macaulay. Of Carlyle it may be said that his services are rather in 

 the theory of criticism than the practice; but both in theory and 

 practice his keynote is "historical": poetry is history vitalized; the 

 poet is the outcome of his own history and the history of the nation. 

 Carlyle taught the significance of poetry, the interpretative function 

 of criticism, and advocated a method of research at once genetic and 

 comparative. His influence in the systematization and limitation of 



