In the first volume of this History we had to summarise the critical work of nearly two thousand years; in the second, that of two whole centuries, with the major part of that of the third. In this we have had the apparently more manageable task of considering the whole work of the nineteenth century only, with the _remanets_ (left over, not by accident but design) from the eighteenth and earlier. Yet it would be a poor compliment to the reader’s intelligence to waste time in explaining to him that the weight of the task is very little lightened by the lessened number of the years with which we have to deal. And the actual congestion of the volume ought all the less to be increased by repetition of things already said in former Prefaces, or by single-stick play with reviewers. Some points, which seemed to be really worth handling, I have dealt with in the text; the others I must let alone. I have little fear that many impartial and competent critics will dispute my claim to have surveyed the matter with the actual documents in hand, and not (save in the rare cases specified) from comments and go-betweens, from abstracts and translations; while such critics may even grant my “mass,” as some indeed have in their kindness granted it already, a fair share of “agitating mind,” under the conditions and with the limitations specified in the original preface. I may at least hope that I shall not be charged with “la fretta Che l’onestade ad ogni atto dismaga,” in regard to a book which has been the actual work and companion of seven years in its composition, the result of more than seven-and-twenty in direct or indirect preparation. After all it is, as Dante says elsewhere, for knowledge “not to prove but to set forth its subject,” and I do not see any further necessity to argue against the notion that Criticism, alone of the departments of literary energy, is to be denied a simple and straightforward History of its actual accomplishments. That is what I set myself to give. If other people want other things, let them go and do them. When the next History of Criticism is written it will doubtless be, if the author knows his business, a much better book than mine; but I may perhaps hope that his might be worse, and would certainly cost him more time and labour, were it not for this.