I am, after careful examination, certain myself, and I hope that the results of that examination may make it clear to others, that they did _not_ “order these things better in France,” that they did not order them nearly so well. The subject of this volume has more unity than that of the last; and I have thought it permissible to avail myself of this fact in the arrangement of the Interchapters. The whole of so-called Classical or Neo-classic Criticism is so intimately connected that almost any of its characteristic documents from Vida to La Harpe might be made the text of a sermon on the entire phenomenon in its complete development. And in the same way, though with an opposite effect, all general comment might, without any grave historical or logical impropriety, have been postponed to the end of the volume. But this would, in the first place, have broken the uniformity of the book; in the second, it would have necessitated a final Interchapter (or “inter-conclusion”) of portentous and disproportionate length; and in the third, it would have too long withheld from the reader those resting-places and intermediate views, as from various stations on Pisgah, which seem to me to be the great advantages and conveniences of the arrangement. I have therefore, while keeping the historical character and distribution of the summaries of the three centuries which happen pretty accurately to coincide with the three stages of the whole phase, made the logical gist of the first to concern chiefly the rise of the classical-critical attitude; of the second that constituted creed or code which was explicitly assented to, or implicitly accepted, by the entire period except in the case of rebels; while in the third I have concentrated criticism of this criticism as a whole. The three Interchapters are thus in manner consecutive and interdependent; but they will, I hope, serve not less to connect and illuminate the contents of the several books and of the whole volume than to conduct the story and the argument of the entire work duly from the beginning to the end of the appointed stage. They are perhaps specially important here because of the mass and number of minor figures with whom I have had to deal. I know that some excellent judges dislike this _numerus_ and would have attention concentrated on the chiefs. But that is not my conception of literary history.