The ambiguities are those, of course, which led to that transformation of critical theory and artistic practice which we associate with the romantic movement. In this light, it is interesting to note that just fourteen years after the first publication of the "Dissertation" William Hazlitt could take a stand almost identical in gross characteristics with that of Scott and the others--this in his "Why the Arts are Not Progressive."[4] For Hazlitt, because "the arts unlike the sciences and the forms of high civilization in general hold immediate communication with nature," they develop best soon after their "birth" and thrive "in a state of society which [is], in other respects, comparatively barbarous." He goes so far as to instance Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, Ariosto, Raphael, Titian, Michaelangelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio. In all its extremity, in its inclusive view of what constitutes a barbarous society and its peculiar cultural virtues, this is but the conventional doctrine of Scott and all those who came before him. But it is, in Hazlitt, transformed into a statement, not, as in Scott's predecessors, of a rationale for the weakness of art in their time, nor, as in Scott himself, of a dimly espoused hope of art in his time. It becomes a frank, "sympathetic" statement of a fact of life which, when granted, will enable men to enjoy and comprehend great art of all ages. The doctrine is focussed on the work of art, not on the culture which lacks it; it has been crucially transformed from a historical into a heuristic principle. Scott's "Dissertation" embodies the doctrine just before its transformation--a neoclassical strain, we can say, just before it had became a romantic strain. Scott almost takes his stand with Hazlitt; but he is not quite there. And not being quite there, he is a whole world away. Roy Harvey Pearce Ohio State University NOTES