IV. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ was the last word of the school which the Restoration had enthroned; the final verdict of the supreme court which gave the law to English letters from the accession of Anne to the French Revolution. Save in the splenetic outbursts of Byron--and they are not to be taken too seriously--the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism fell silent at Johnson's death. A time of anarchy followed; anarchy _plus_ the policeman's truncheon of the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_. [Footnote: The first number of the _Edinburgh_ appeared in 1802; the _Quarterly_ was started in a counterblast in 1809.] The ill-fame of these Reviews, as they were in their pride of youth, is now so great that doubts may sometimes suggest themselves whether it can possibly be deserved. No one who feels such doubts can do better than turn to the earlier numbers; he will be forced to the conclusion that, whatever their services as the journeymen of letters and of party politics, few critics could have been so incompetent to judge of genius as the men who enlisted under the standard of Jeffrey or of Gifford. There is not, doubtless, in either Review the same iron wall of reasoned prejudice that has been noted in Johnson, but there is a plentiful lack of the clear vision and the openness to new impressions which are the first necessity of the critic. What Carlyle says of Jeffrey and the _Edinburgh_ may be taken as the substantial truth also about Gifford and the _Quarterly_, and it is the most pregnant judgment that has yet been passed upon them. "Jeffrey may be said to have begun the rash, reckless style of criticising everything in heaven and earth by appeal to Moliere's maid: 'Do _you_ like it?' '_Don't_ you like it?' a style which, in hands more and more inferior to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has since grown gradually to such immeasurable length among us; and he himself is one of the first that suffers by it. If praise and blame are to be perfected, not in the mouth of Moliere's maid only but in that of mischievous, precocious babes and sucklings, you will arrive at singular judgments by degrees." [Footnote: Carlyle, _Reminiscences_ n 63, 64 ]