her and for Literature: but they were not her sworn servants, as Lessing and Hazlitt, as Sainte-Beuve and Arnold, were later. ----- Footnote 285: See vol. i. p. 321 note. Footnote 286: Fracastoro and Scaliger could at once obtain a writ of ease, as De Quincey is evidently speaking of “Italian” critics in the vernacular. I hope he was not thinking of Tasso here, or of Gravina later: but the seventeenth and eighteenth century men are certainly in more danger of his judgment. ----- Let there be to them not the less but almost the more glory! It is something—nay, it is very much—to have created a Kind. Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he had taken all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. Roman _dilettanti_ had dallied with her. The solid good sense and good feeling of Quintilian had decided that she must be “no casual mistress but a wife” (perhaps on rather polygamic principles) to the student of oratory. Longinus had suddenly fixed her colours on his helmet, and had ridden in her honour the most astonishing little _chevauchée_ in the annals of adventurous literature. The second greatest poet of the world had done her at once yeoman’s service and stately courtesy. And yet she was, in the general literary view, not so much _déclassée_ as not classed at all—not “out,” not accorded the _entrées_. This was now all over. The country which gave the literary tone and set the literary fashions of Europe had adopted Criticism in the most unmistakable manner—whether in the manner wisest or most perfect is not for the present essential. Rank thus given is never lost; at any rate, there is no recorded instance of a literary attainder for Kinds, whatever there may be for persons.