When the first volume of this history was published, an excellent scholar said to me, “How will you ever finish that book? Why, Coleridge himself would take a volume!” There is something to be said for the hyperbole. In this and that critic, of these many ages which we have essayed to survey, we may find critical graces which are not in him; but in all, save two, we shall find corresponding deficiencies. In all the ancient critics, save these two, the limitation of the point of view, the hamper of the scheme, are disastrously felt, nor is either Aristotle or Longinus quite free from them. In the greatest of the sixteenth-century Italians these limitations recur, and are repeated in most of those of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Dante is of the greatest, but he touches the subject very briefly and from a special side. Dryden is great, but he is not fully informed, and comes too early for his own point of view. Fontenelle is very nearly great, but he has the same drawbacks, and adds to them those of an almost, perhaps a quite, wilful eccentricity and capriciousness. Lessing is great, but he has fixed his main attention on the least literary parts of literature; while Goethe later is great but a great pedant.[430] Hazlitt is great; but Coleridge was Hazlitt’s master, and beside the master the pupil is insular and parochial in range and reading if not in spirit. In Sainte-Beuve himself we want a little more theory; some more enthusiasm; a higher and more inspiriting choice of subjects. And in Mr. Arnold the defects of Fontenelle reappear without Fontenelle’s excuse of chronology.