I am, I confess, unable to see that either Logic or Architectonic is outraged by this preannounced and methodical limitation of proceeding. I have given, or attempted to give, my “Atlas” of the actual facts with what accuracy and clearness I could. The complement of Theory I do not pretend to supply, and I cannot see that anybody has a right to demand it. Whoso wants to take it let him make it: my facts ought to help him in the making, and if they do not, he and not the facts must bear the blame. This book has attempted to provide, in an orderly arrangement, and, as far as might be in the space, exhaustively, what has called itself and has been called Criticism (certain varieties being, for reasons given, excluded or less fully treated) from the beginnings of Greek literature, as we have them, to the present day. Of these provisions I think I may say—without prejudice to any further use of them that any one may choose to make—_his utere mecum_: and I will just add that had anybody offered me the same provision thirty years ago, I should have been profoundly thankful, and have been spared many a weary hour of gleaning here and groping there. I shall even be so very bold as to say that what I have actually done, or attempted to do, seems to me in the true sense both _philosophoteron_ and _spoudaioteron_ than what my censors would have liked me to do. Any tolerably clever undergraduate, reading for Greats, could sketch (in after-life amusing himself, and perhaps impressing others, by accumulating arguments in support, or in destruction, of his undergraduate hypothesis) explanations of the distaste of the ancients for “appreciative” criticism, of the critical silence of the Middle Ages, of the French and English attitude of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism and sixteenth-seventeenth century creation, of the time of bondage to Good Sense, of the avatars and phases of Taste. I would undertake myself to make a complete set in a Long Vacation, with arguments _pro_ and _con_ in the “best and most orgilous” manner. But I should not believe one of them, and I should mutter _O vix sancta simplicitas!_ if anybody were taken in by them. In what I have given there is no possibility of taking in, and no need to believe or disbelieve. Here are the simple facts, disengaged by a certain amount of hard labour from their more or less accessible sources and quarries, and ranged, whether ill or well, yet at any rate with some system, and in such a fashion that they must be reasonably easy to master. I may not be an architect, but think I may claim to be a tolerable quarryman and a purveyor of the stone in fairly convenient arrangement, workably rough-hewed. And your most gifted architect will find himself put to it to make his Beauvais or his Batalha, his Salisbury or his Strasburg, from stone unquarried or unshaped to his hand. I have, in short, endeavoured to give a tolerably complete collection of facts which have never been collected before.