been regarded at Rome as a worthy occasion either of pity or horror.” And he does not in the least seem to see—probably he would have indignantly denied—that in saying this he is denying the Romans any _literary_ sense at all. In Aristophanes he has nothing to remark but his “extreme coarseness and vulgarity”; and “the immense difference between Thucydides and Tacitus” is adjusted to the advantage of the Roman. He actually seems to prefer Augustan to Greek poetry, and makes the astonishing remark that “there is nothing at all in the whole range of Greek literature like ... the fourth book of Virgil,” having apparently never so much as heard of Apollonius Rhodius.[556] That of mediæval literature he says practically nothing is not surprising, but it must be taken into account: and his defence of English Literature against his author, though perfectly good against _her_, is necessarily rather limited by its actual purpose, and suggests somehow that other limitations would have appeared if it had been freed from this. [Sidenote: _Its lesson._] In short, though we cannot support the conclusion further, the very word “limitation” suggests the name of Jeffrey, in the sphere of criticism. He seems to be constantly “pulled up” by some mysterious check-rein, turned back by some half-invisible obstacle. Sometimes—by no means quite always—we can concatenate the limiting causes,—deduce them from something known and anterior, but they are almost always present or impending. As Leigh Hunt is the most catholic of critics, so Jeffrey is almost the most sectarian: the very shibboleths of his sectarianism being arbitrarily combined, and to a great extent peculiar to himself.[557] [Sidenote: _Hallam._] Let us conclude the chapter with a figure scarcely less representative of the anti-enthusiast school of critics, and much more agreeable than either Gifford or Jeffrey. To the English student of literary history and of literary criticism, Henry Hallam must always be a name _clarum et venerabile_; nor—as has been so often pointed out in these pages, and as unfortunately it seems still so often necessary[558] to point out—need disagreement with a great many of his own critical judgments and belief that—for those who merely swallow such judgments whole—he is not the safest of critical teachers, interfere with such due homage. [Sidenote: _His achievement._] For Hallam was our first master in English of the true comparative-historical study of literature—the study without which, as one main result of this volume should be to show, all criticism is now unsatisfactory, and the special variety of criticism which has been cultivated for the last century most dangerously delusive. His Introduction to the _Literature of Europe_, with its sketch of mediæval and its fuller treatment of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Literature, is the earliest book of the kind in our language: it is not far from being, to this day, the best book of the kind in any.