The benefits, therefore, of the rise of Æsthetics as a special study were far from unmixed, though the influence of that rise was very great. It is otherwise with the Study of Literature, to which we have also given a short and summary chapter above. Here it was all but impossible that extension of consideration—from modern and classical to mediæval, from certain arbitrarily preferred modern languages to others—should fail to do good. Prejudice, the bane of Criticism, received, in the mere and necessary progress of this study, a notice to quit. This notice took various forms and was exhibited and attended to in various ways. England, France, and Germany exhibited these differences with a difference itself very interesting. But they can be reduced to a few heads with very little difficulty. The first of these is the attempt to judge the work presented, not according to abstract rules, derived or supposed to be derived from ancient critical authority, nor according to its agreement or disagreement with the famous work of the past. To some extent this revolutionary proceeding was forced upon our students by the very nature of the case—it was one of the inevitable benefits of the extension of study, and especially of the return to mediæval literature. To attempt to justify that literature, as Addison, with more or less seriousness, had done, by showing that its methods were after all not so very different from those of Homer, or even Virgil, was in some cases flatly impossible, in most extremely difficult; while in almost all it carried with it a distinct suspicion of burlesque. There was no need of any _dislike_ of the classics; but it must have been and it was felt that mediæval and later literature must be handled _differently_.[344] And so—insensibly no doubt at first—there came into Criticism the sovereign and epoch-making recognition of the “leaden rule”—of the fact that literature comes first and criticism after—that criticism must adjust itself to literature, and not _vice versa_. Very likely not one of the men we are here discussing would have accepted this doctrine _simpliciter_:[345] indeed it is the rarest thing to find it accepted even a century and a half after their time, except in eccentric and extravagant forms. But it lay at the root of all their practice.