Their critical habits, as we have seen sufficiently in the last Book, had been mainly negative; and for this reason, if for no other, a considerable critical development would have been certain to spring up. But there were other reasons, and powerful ones. In the first place, the atmosphere of revolt which was abroad necessarily breeds, or rather necessarily implies, criticism. A few, whom the equal Jove has loved, may be able to criticise while acquiescing, approving, even loving and strenuously championing; but this equity is not exceedingly common, and the general tendency of acceptance, and even of acquiescence, is distinctly uncritical. On the other hand, the rebel is driven either to his rebellion by the exercise of his critical faculty, or to the exercise of his critical faculty in order to justify his rebellion. I do not myself hold that the Devil was the first critic. I have not the slightest desire to serve myself and my subject heirs to that spirit unfortunate; but I recognise the necessity of some argument to rebut the filiation. And that these generalities should become particular in reference to Literary Criticism more especially, there were additional and momentous inducements of two different kinds. [Sidenote: _Particular._] In the first place, the malcontents with the immediate past must in any case have been drawn to attack the literary side of its battlements, because of their extreme weakness. Everywhere but in the two extremities of the West, Italy and Scotland (the latter, owing to the very small bulk of its literary production, and the rudimentary condition of its language, being hardly an exception at all), the fifteenth century, even with a generous eking from the earliest sixteenth, had been a time of literary torpor and literary decadence, relieved only by a few—a very few—brilliant individual performances. In England the successors of Chaucer, not content with carrying his method and his choice of subject no further, had almost incomprehensibly lost command of both. In France the _rhétoriqueur_ school of poets had degenerated less in form, but had been almost equally unable to show any progress, or even any [Sidenote: _Weakness of Vernaculars._] maintained command, of matter. Germany was far worse than either. If Chaucer himself could criticise, indirectly but openly, the faults of the still vigorous and beautiful romance—of the romance which in his own country was yet to boast Chester in verse and Malory in prose—how much more must any one with sharp sense and sound taste, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have been tempted to apply some similar process to the fossilised formalism of _rondeau_ and _ballade_; to the lifeless and lumbering allegory of the latest “Rose” imitations; to the “aureate,” or rather tinselled, bombast of Chastellain and Robertet?