Nor was this least the case in respect of criticism.[198] The history of this part of English literary evolution has been, until recently, much neglected; and it can hardly be said even yet to have received comprehensive attention. [Sidenote: _Backwardness of English Criticism not implying inferiority._] It is all the more necessary to bestow some time and pains on it here, with at least some fair hope of correcting an unfair depreciation. The Baron of Bradwardine (displaying that shrewd appreciation of contrast between English and Scottish characteristics which belonged, if not to himself, to his creator) remarked to Colonel Talbot that it was the Colonel’s “humour, as he [the Baron] had seen in other gentlemen of birth and honour” in the Colonel’s country, “to derogate from the honour of his burgonet.” Gentlemen of the most undoubted birth and honour (as such things go in literature), from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have displayed this humour in regard to English criticism. But there has been something too much of it; and it has been taken far too literally by the ignorant. M. Brunetière has expressed his opinion that Frenchmen would make _un véritable marché de dupe_ if they exchanged Boileau, Marmontel, La Harpe, and Co. for Lessing and some others. I shall not in this place express any opinion on that question directly. But, if this book does what I shall endeavour to make it do, it will at least show that to exchange, for any foreign company, our own critics, from Sidney and Ben Jonson, through Dryden and Addison, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, to Mr Arnold himself, would be “_un véritable marché de_”—Moses Primrose. ----- Footnote 198: The two chief monographs on this are Spingarn, _op. cit._, in the division appurtenant (pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E. Schelling, _Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth_, Philadelphia, 1891. Haslewood reprinted most of the texts together in _Ancient Critical Essays_, 2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber the most important separately in his _English Reprints_. Mr Gregory Smith is now editing, for the Clarendon Press, the fullest collection yet issued. ----- It will have been sufficiently seen in the last volume that the backwardness of English—a backwardness long exaggerated, but to some extent real, and to no small extent healthy—was nowhere exhibited more distinctly than in the department which supplies the materials of this history. Until the close of the fifteenth century, and for some decades afterwards, not a single critical treatise on English existed in the English language, or even in Latin; the nearest approach, even in fragment, to any utterance of the kind being the _naïf_ and interesting, but only infantinely critical, remarks of Caxton in his prefaces.[199] ----- Footnote 199: