It cannot be said that Hume does not invite notice as a critic; on the contrary, his title of “_Essays: Moral, Political,_[296] and Literary” seems positively to challenge it. Yet his actual literary utterances are rather few, and would be almost unimportant but for the considerations just put. He tells us criticism is difficult;[297] he applies[297] (as Johnson did somewhat differently) Fontenelle’s remark about “telling the hours”; he illustrates from Holland the difference of excellence in commerce and in literature.[298] He condemns—beforehand, and with the vigour and acuteness which we should expect from him—the idea of attempting to account for the existence of a particular poet at a particular time and in a particular place.[299] He is shocked at the vanity, at the rudeness, and at the loose language of the ancients.[300] He approaches, as Tassoni[301] and Perrault[302] had approached, one of the grand _cruces_ of the whole matter by making his Sceptic urge that “_beauty_ and worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist of an agreeable sentiment produced by an object on a particular mind”;[303] but he makes no detailed use or application whatever of this as regards literature. His Essay on _Simplicity and Refinement in Writing_[304] is psychology rather than criticism, and he uses his terms in a rather curious manner. At least, I myself find it difficult to draw up any definitions of these qualities which will make Pope the _ne plus ultra_ of justifiable Refinement, and Lucretius that of Simplicity; Virgil and Racine the examples of the happy mean in both; Corneille and Congreve excessive in Refinement, and Sophocles and Terence excessive in Simplicity.[305] The whole is, however, a good rationalising of the “classical” principle; and is especially interesting as noticing, with slight reproof, a tendency to too great “affectation and conceit” both in France and England—faults for which _we_ certainly should not indict the mid-eighteenth century. The Essay _On Tragedy_ is more purely psychological still. And though _On the Standard of Taste_ is less open to this objection, one cannot but see that it is Human Nature, and not Humane Letters, in which Hume is really interesting himself. The vulgar censure on the reference to Bunyan[306] is probably excessive; for it is at least not improbable that Hume had never read a line of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, and was merely using the tinker’s name as a kind of type-counter. But this very acceptance of a conventional judgment— acceptance constantly repeated throughout the Essay—is almost startling in context with the _alleszermalmend_ tendency of some of its principles. A critic who says[307] that “It is evident that none of the rules of composition are fixed by reasonings _a priori_,” is in fact saying “Take away that bauble!” in regard to Neo-classicism altogether; and though in the very same page Hume repeats the orthodox cavils at