His literary places 152 The _De Studiorum Ratione_ 153 The _De Constantia Jurisprudentis_ 153 The first _Scienza Nuova_ 154 The second 154 Rationale of all this 155 A very great man and thinker, but in pure Criticism an influence malign or null 156 England 157 Shaftesbury 157 Hume 159 Examples of his critical opinions 160 His inconsistency 162 Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful 163 The Scottish æsthetic-empirics: Alison 164 The _Essay on Taste_ 165 Its confusions 166 And arbitrary absurdities 167 An interim conclusion on the æsthetic matter 168 CHAPTER VI. THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. Bearings of the chapter 171 England 171 The study of Shakespeare 172 Of Spenser 173 Chaucer 174 Elizabethan minors 174 Middle and Old English 175 Influence of English abroad 176 The study of French at home and abroad 177 Of Italian 179 Especially Dante 179 Of Spanish 180 Especially Cervantes 182 Of German 182 INTERCHAPTER VII. 184 BOOK VIII. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM. CHAPTER I. WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES. Wordsworth and Coleridge 200 The former’s Prefaces 201 That to _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800 202 Its history 202 The argument against poetic diction, and even against metre 203 The appendix: Poetic Diction again 204