For by them, in place of these battered gods of the classical or neo-classical Philistia, are set up Imagination for Reason, Enthusiasm for Good Sense, the Result for the Rule; the execution for the mere conception or even the mere selection of subject; impression for calculation; the heart and the eyes and the pulses and the fancy for the stop-watch and the boxwood measure and the table of specifications. It is not necessary to argue the question whether Blake’s own poetical work (we are not concerned with his pictorial) justifies or disconcerts the theories under which it was composed; it may be very strongly suspected, from utterances new as well as old, that approval of the theory and approval of the practice, as well as disapproval in each case, are too intimately bound up with each other to make appeal to either much of an argument. But for our main purpose, which is purely historical, the importance of Blake should, even in these few pages, have been put out of doubt. In no contemporary—not in Coleridge himself—is the counter-creed to that of the Neo-classics formulated with a sharper precision, and withal a greater width of inclusion and sweep. [Sidenote: _Sir Walter Scott commonly undervalued as a critic._] There are more senses than one (or for the matter of that two) in the famous proverb, “The better is the enemy of the good.” And in one of them, though not the commonest, it is eminently true of the criticism of Sir Walter Scott. No one, of course, would give to Scott any such relative rank as a critic as that which is his due either as poet or as novelist; but the extent to which his fame as poet and novelist has obscured his reputation as critic is altogether disproportionate and unfair. It is even doubtful whether some tolerably educated persons ever think of him as a critic at all. For his so-called “Prose Works” (except _Tales of a Grandfather_) are very little read, and as usual the criticism is the least read part of them. Yet it is a very large part— extending, what with the Lives of _Swift_ and _Dryden_, the shorter “_Biographies_,” the _Chivalry, Romance, and Drama_, and the collection or selection of _Periodical Criticism_, to ten pretty solid volumes, while even this excludes a great amount of critical matter in the notes and Introductions to the _Poems_, the Novels, the _Dryden_ and _Swift_ themselves, and other by-works of Sir Walter’s gigantic industry.