Such an estimate as that given by Ascham as Cheke’s of Sallust simply could not have suggested itself to any mediæval mind; the Humanist practice of the fifteenth century had—quite early in the sixteenth—made it natural enough, at least as regards ancient writers. And it was constantly becoming more and more common as to moderns. The Italians, in a limited and scholastic fashion, had begun it long before as to Dante; they continued it in regard to Boccaccio and Petrarch; they were spurred on to practise it more and more, first by the immense popularity of the _Orlando_, and then by the rival (and deliberately urged as rival) charms of the _Gerusalemme_. Compare for one moment the survey of books and authors which we quoted or summarised from the _Labyrinthus_ in the last volume with that which we have analysed from Lilius Giraldus in this—the whole point of view, the whole method of handling, is altered. In France and England more specially, attempts, clumsy, limited, subject to whatever epithet of qualification any one pleases to apply, as they may be, are made to take a backward historical view of poetry at least; and when great work such as Ronsard’s or Spenser’s is produced, there is a real, if rudimentary, attempt made to judge it critically. By the time that we reach Ben Jonson—who no doubt has a strong tinge of the seventeenth century superinduced, by nature as well as time, on his sixteenth-century nativity—such _aperçus_ almost of the highest critical kind in their species, as those on Bacon and Shakespeare, are possible to at least the higher intellects,—it needs but a step to the very highest kind, such as that of Dryden on the same Shakespeare. That what we have called the crystallisation of a critical creed affects these estimates not always for the best is not of real importance—the point is that we have at last got them. These are great things, but, still postponing criticism on this criticism as a whole, we may point out one or two drawbacks in it which already appear, and which are quite independent of individual inclination on the vexed questions of Classic or Romantic, Practice or Rule, Subject or Expression.