I remember still, with amusement after many years, the words of, I suppose, a youthful reviewer who, admitting that an author whom he was reviewing had applied the method of Coleridge as to Shakespeare, &c., with some skill and even some originality, hinted that this method was quite _vieux jeu_, and that modern criticism was taking and to take an entirely different line. And I have been grateful to that reviewer ever since for giving me a mental smile whenever I think of him. That his new critical Evangel—it was the “scientific” gospel of the late M. Hennequin, if “amid the memories long outworn Of many-_volumed eve and_ morn” I do not mistake—has itself gone to the dustbin meanwhile does not matter, and is not the cause of the smile. The risibility is in the notion that any great criticism can ever be obsolete. We may, we must, we ought sometimes to differ with Aristotle and Longinus, with Quintilian and Scaliger, with Patrizzi and Castelvetro, with Dryden and Johnson, with Sainte-Beuve and Arnold. But what is good in them—and even what, though not so intrinsically good, is injured only by system and point of view, by time and chance and fatality—remains a possession for ever. “The eternal substance of their greatness” is of the same kind (although it be less generally recognised or relished) as the greatness of creation. _La Mort n’y mord_. Of such matter Coleridge provides us with abundance everywhere, and perhaps most on Shakespeare. He acknowledges his debts to Lessing, and was perhaps unduly anxious to deny any to the Schlegels; but he has made everything that he may have borrowed his own, and he has wealth untold that is not borrowed at all. He can go wrong like other people. His favourite and constantly repeated denunciation of Johnson’s couplet— “Let Observation with extensive view Survey mankind from China to Peru”— as “bombast and tautology,” as equivalent to “let observation with extensive observation survey mankind extensively,” is not only unjust but actually unintelligent,[378] and probably due only to the horror of eighteenth-century personification, intensified in Coleridge by the fact that in his own early poems he had freely indulged therein. [Sidenote: _Some noteworthy things in them: general,_]