Now, a thoroughgoing “Romantic” and comparative critic of the modern type, while he would, of course, scout the first party, would be loath to adopt either the method or the exact conclusions of the second. “Let us clear our minds of cant,” he would say. “These things are not ‘faults’ at all. They do not leave the court pardoned on consideration of the previous or subsequent good behaviour of the culprit, but simply because there is no stain on his or their character. There is no need to plead extenuating circumstances: we stand for acquittal _sans phrase_. These things might be faults elsewhere, in other poems: they are not so here. They are the absolutely right things in the right place, producing the right effect, driven home by the right power to the right mark. Shakespeare and Milton _have_ faults—the somewhat excessive tendency of the first to play on words out of season as well as in, and the deplorable propensity of the second to joke when joking was absolutely impossible to him. But these are not of the character of the Longinian or Quintilianian ‘fault’ at all. They do not endear the poets; they make them less good; we wish they _were_ faultless in this sense. Your ‘faultlessness’ simply means that the man has that most hopeless of all faults—mediocrity: and your ‘fault’ is simply derived from the existence in your mind of a more or less complicated set of rules which have no real existence. Nay,” he might proceed, “the extremest classical men are sounder in a way than you are. They are right in thinking that a fault _is_ a fault, and can never be ‘redeemed,’ much less purged, by a beauty. They are only wrong in not knowing what beauties or what faults really are.” Now, I do not say whether the criticism of antiquity was right or wrong in not taking this view. But I think there is absolutely no evidence that it was ever taken at this time.