It is perhaps vain to attempt to tone down the audacity of the present essay by any explanations or limitations; it is certain that those who are offended by it at first blush are very unlikely to be propitiated by excuses of the faults which, excusably or inexcusably, it no doubt contains. The genesis of it is as follows. When, not much less than thirty years ago, the writer was first asked to undertake the duty of a critic, he had naturally to overhaul his own acquaintance with the theory and practice of criticism, and to inquire what was the acquaintance of others therewith. The disconcerting smallness of the first was a little compensated by the discovery that very few persons seemed to be much better furnished. Dr Johnson’s projected “History of Criticism, as it relates to Judging of Authours” no doubt has had fellows in the great library of books unwritten. But there were then, and I believe there are still, only two actual attempts to deal with the whole subject. One of these[1] I have never seen, and indeed had never heard of till nearly the whole of the present volume was written. Moreover, it seems to be merely a torso. The other, Théry’s _Histoire des Opinions Littéraires_,[2] a book which, after two editions at some interval, has been long out of print, is a work of great liveliness, no small knowledge, and, in its airy French kind, a good deal of acuteness. But the way in which “Critique Arabe,” “Critique Juive,” &c., are knocked off in a page or a paragraph at one end, and the way in which, at the other—though the second edition was published when Mr Arnold was just going to write, and the first when Coleridge, and Hazlitt, and Lamb had already written—the historian knows of nothing English later than Campbell and Blair, are things a little disquieting. At any rate, neither of these was then known to me, and I had, year by year, to pick up for myself, and piece together, the greater and lesser classics of the subject in a haphazard and groping fashion. Footnote 1: Delia Critica, Libri Tre. B. Mazzarella, Geneva, 1866. The book to which I owe my knowledge of this, Professors Gayley and Scott’s _Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism_, Boston, U.S.A., 1899, is invaluable as a bibliography, and has much more than merely bibliographical interest. Footnote 2: Ed. 2, Paris, 1849. The first edition may have appeared between 1830 and 1840. Vapereau says 1844, which would strengthen my point in the text; but this does not seem to agree with the Preface of the second.