What is almost more important is that the _average_ literary criticism of William IV.'s reign and of the first twenty years of her present Majesty's was exceedingly bad. At one side, of course, the work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict. At the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a favourite pen on the _Times_, and enjoying (I do not know with how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray's _Thunder and Small Beer_ has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very rudiments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same uncertainty and "wobbling" between the expression of unconnected and unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and form.
Not for the first time help came to us Trojans _Graia ab urbe_. Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many years fashionable in England to hold. But between 1830 and 1860 the French had a very strong critical school indeed--a school whose scholars and masters showed the dæmonic, or at least prophetic, inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Mérimée, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before ordering him off to execution.