Another drawback which it may seem captious, or ungenerous, or even childish, to urge, but which really has a great deal to do with the matter, is that, active as the period was in criticism, it did not produce a single very great critic practising on a great scale. Its four or five critics of greatest literary genius were (I exclude Bacon for reasons given, and Spenser hardly comes in) Ronsard, Du Bellay, Tasso, Sidney, and Ben Jonson. The two Frenchmen dealt with but a small part of the subject, and from but a special point of view; Tasso was mainly “fighting a prize,” and his own prize; Sidney’s was a very little tractate of general, if generous, protest, and entered into no applications; Ben’s critical remains are un-co-ordinated notes. On the other hand, of the specially critical writers, Scaliger on the strictly erudite and strictly classical side, Castelvetro in a sort of middle station, and Patrizzi as a voice crying in the wilderness, are perhaps the only three who rise distinctly above mediocrity. And, as has been pointed out already, Scaliger is too much of a pedant, Castelvetro is a mere commentator, and Patrizzi a philosopher militant, who carries on one of his campaigns in the province of criticism. The disadvantages of this are twofold. Not merely do we get no brilliant and, at least in appearance and claim, authoritative exposition of the subject, like that of Boileau or that of Pope later on the dogmatic side, like those of Dryden and Johnson on the illustrative and exemplifying; but the whole critical system comes into existence by a process of haphazard accretion—by (to repeat a metaphor already used) an accumulation of individual judgments at common law. No doubt this gives a certain strength, a certain naturalness, to the creed when it is formed. It has not been foisted on the _communis sensus_—that _sensus_ has been inured and trained to it. The extraordinary toughness and vitality of the resultant is very likely due to this. But it caused also some of that inconsistency and apparent irrationality which a system of common law almost necessarily contracts as it grows: and it was more and more driven to throw over these inconsistencies and irrationalities that cloak of factitious Reason, or Sense, or Nature which, by the eighteenth century, becomes the mere threadbare disguise of a decrepit Duessa.