The “Notes on Reynolds” are naturally full of our stuff. [Sidenote: _The “Notes on Reynolds”_] “Enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge.” [Sir Joshua had stated just the contrary.] “What has reasoning to do with the art of painting [or, we may safely add, of poetry]?” “Knowledge of ideal beauty is not to be acquired; it is born in us.” “One central form ... being granted, it does not follow that all other forms are deformity. All forms are perfect in the poet’s mind, ... they are from imagination.” “To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the great distinction of merit.” [The “streak of the tulip” re-habilitated, and with a vengeance!] “Invention depends altogether upon execution.” “Passion and expression are beauty itself.” “Ages are all equal: but genius is always above its age.” [Sidenote: _and Wordsworth._] It is worth while to add to these the very remarkable annotations upon Wordsworth’s Prefaces: “I don’t know who wrote these: they are very mischievous, and direct contrary to Wordsworth’s own practice” [where if Blake had added the words “when he is a poet,” he would simply have given the conclusion of the whole matter], with the very shrewd addendum that Wordsworth is not so much attacking poetic diction, or defending his own, as “vindicating unpopular poets.” [Sidenote: _Commanding position of these._] Scanty as this critical budget may seem, its individual items are of extraordinary weight, when we remember that some of them were written before the _Lyrical Ballads_ themselves appeared, and all of them by a man of hardly any reading in contemporary literature, and quite out of the circle of Coleridgean influence. It is scarcely, if at all, too much to say that they are almost enough to start, in a fit mind, the whole system of Romantic criticism in its more abstract form, and sometimes even in its particular and concrete applications. All the eighteenth-century Dagons—the beliefs in official connoisseurship, in the unapproachable supremacy of the ancients, in the barbarism and foolishness of Gothic art and literature, in the superiority of the general to the particular, in the necessity of extracting central forms and holding to them, in the supremacy of reason, in the teachableness of poetry, in the virtues of copying, in the superiority of design to execution,—all are tumbled off their pedestals with the most irreverent violence. That the critic’s applications in the sister art to Rubens, to Titian, to Reynolds himself, are generally unjust, and not infrequently the result of pure ignorance, does not matter; his own formulas would often correct him quite as thoroughly as those of the classical school. What is important is his discovery and enunciation of these formulas themselves.