Edinburgh, information on the point whether what he wants is at any of them, and by exerting himself a little beyond the ordinary could visit all the five in less than a week. When the British Museum was first opened, in the middle of the last century, and Gray went to read in it “through the jaws of a whale,” it would have taken a week or so to communicate with the librarians; they would probably have had to make tedious researches before they could, if they chose to do so, reply, and when the replies were received, the inquirer would have had to spend the best part of a month or more in exhausting, costly, and not always safe journeys, before he could have got at the books. There was, therefore, much direct excuse for the incompleteness and inaccuracy of the facts given by Percy, and Warton, and even Hurd; and not a little indirect excuse for the wildness and baselessness of their conjectures on such points as the Origin of Romance and the like. It is scarcely more than thirty or forty years—it is certainly not more than fifty or sixty—since it began to be possible for the student to acquaint himself with the texts, and inexcusable for the teacher not to do so. It is a very much shorter time than the shortest of these since theories, equally baseless and wild with those of these three, have been confidently and even arrogantly put forward about the origin of the Arthurian legends, and since mere linguistic crotchets have been allowed to interfere with the proper historical survey of European literature. The point of importance, the point of value, was that Percy, and Warton, and Hurd, not only to the huge impatience of Johnson, the common friend of the first two, devoted their attention to ballad, and romance, and saga, and mediæval treatise—not only recognised and allowed the principle that in dealing with new literary forms we must use new literary measures—not only in practice, if not in explicit theory, accepted the pleasure of the reader, and the idiosyncrasy of the book, and the “leaden rule” which adapts itself to Art and not Art to itself, as the grounds of criticism, but laid the foundations of that wider study of literary history which is not so much indispensable to literary criticism as it is literary criticism itself. [Sidenote: _Studies in Prosody._]