literary _causerie_, the applied and illustrative complement, in regard to individual books, authors, or small subjects, of the literary history proper. When people at last begin to appreciate what literary history means, there will probably be, in every country, a collection of the best essays of this kind arranged from their authors’ works conveniently for the use of the student. And when such a collection is made in England, no small part in it will be played by articles taken from the _Retrospective Review_. [Sidenote: _The_ Baviad _and_ Anti-Jacobin,] For the last subdivision of this chapter we must go a little backwards. The phenomena of English criticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century are curious: and they might be used to support such very different theories of the relations of Criticism and Creation, that their most judicious use, perhaps, is to point the moral of the riskiness of _any_ such theories. During this decade one great generation was dying off and another even greater was but coming on. Except Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, and Burke’s last and best work (which were both entirely of the past, and in the former case, at least, presented a purely personal product), and the _Lyrical Ballads_ (which were wholly of the future), with the shadowy work of Blake (hardly of any time or even any place), nothing of extraordinary goodness appeared. But a great deal appeared of a most ordinary and typical badness, and this seems to have excited a peculiar kind of irregular or Cossack criticism to carry on a guerilla war against the hosts of dreary or fantastic dulness. Criticism had at this time little of a standing army: the old _Critical_ and _Monthly_ Reviews were sinking into dotage (though such a man as Southey wrote in the former), and the new class of comparatively independent censorship, which put money in its purse and carried its head high, was to wait for the _Edinburgh_ and the next century. But Hayley and Sir James Bland Burges and the Della Cruscans; but Darwin even, and even Godwin; nay, the very early antics of such men as Coleridge and Southey themselves, with some things in them not so antic perhaps, but seeming to their contemporaries of an antic disposition—were more than critical flesh and blood could stand. [Sidenote: _with Wolcot and Mathias._] The spirit which had animated Rivarol[549] on the other side of the Channel came to animate Wolcot (who had indeed showed it for some time[550]) and his enemy Gifford, and the greater wits of the _Anti-Jacobin_, and even the pedantic and prosaic Mathias.