In presenting the second volume of this attempt, I feel no compunction, and offer no apology, for what may seem to some the surprisingly large space given to English critics. That the book itself is intended primarily for English readers would be but a poor-spirited plea; and the greatness of English literature as a whole, though a worthier, is still an unnecessary argument. For the fact is, that the positive value and importance of English criticism itself are far greater than has been usually allowed. Owing very mainly to the not unintelligible or inexcusable, but unfortunate, initiative of Mr Matthew Arnold, it has become a fashion to speak of this branch of our national literature, if not even of the function of the national genius which it expresses, with bated breath, and with humble acknowledgment of the superiority of German, and still more of French, critics. This superiority, I say without the slightest fear, is a fond thing vainly invented. English criticism was rather late, and for a long time rather intermittent; nor did it fail, after the manner of the nation, to derive fresh impulses and new departures in the sixteenth century from Italian, in the seventeenth and again in the nineteenth century from French, and at the end of the eighteenth from German. But it is not true that in so much as one of these cases it was contented slavishly to imitate; and it is not true that, with the doubtful exception of Sainte-Beuve, foreign countries have had any critics greater than our own, while they have, even put together, hardly so many great ones. In everything but mere superficial consistency Dryden is a head and shoulders above Boileau as a critic; Coleridge a head, shoulders, and body above the Schlegels, whom he followed. Long before Sainte-Beuve, Hazlitt had shown a genius for real criticism, as distinguished from barren formula-making, which no critic has surpassed. And Mr Arnold himself, with less range, equity, and sureness than Sainte-Beuve, has a finer literary taste and touch. As for that _general_ superiority of French criticism of which we have heard so much, the unerring voice of actual history will tell us that it never existed at all, except, perhaps, for a generation before 1660, and a generation before 1860, the latter being the period which called forth, but misled, Mr Arnold’s admiration. With this last we do not here deal; nor with the Romantic revolt, in dealing with which it will be pertinent to appraise the relative excellence of Lessing and Goethe as compared with Coleridge and Hazlitt. But we have within our present range an almost better field of comparison, in that “neo-classic” period from Boileau to La Harpe, and from Dryden to Johnson, in which, on the whole, and taking recognised orthodoxy only, the critics of France and of England worshipped the same idols, subscribed the same confessions of faith, and to no small extent even applied their principles to the same texts and subjects.