So far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the traditional limits of theological hatred. For what follows there is not even that poor excuse. "If we might withdraw the veil of his private life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text. . .Mr. Shelley is too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world but the little world within his own breast." [Footnote: Quarterly Review, xxi. 460, &c.] For the credit of both Reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another instance of so foul a blow as this: [Footnote: Except in the infamous insinuations, also a crime of the _Quarterly_,] Non ragioniam di _lui_, ma guarda e passa. [Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous attack on the character of Leigh Hunt in _Blackwood_, vol III 453] Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ are memorable for two reasons in the history of English literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way, slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their own haphazard dogmatism. By their very nature they were an appeal to the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a revolution. Of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run, four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows. These are Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The critical work of all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century; [Footnote: Some of the dates are as follows Lamb's _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ was published in 1808, his _Essays of Elia_ began to appear in the _London Magazine_, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course, in 1811-12, his _Biographia Literana_ in 1817 Hazlitt's _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays_ was published in 1817, his _Lectures on the English Poets_ in 1818, and on _The English Comic Writers_ in 1819 Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in the _Edinburgh_ and other Reviews) in 1827, that on Diderot--the last notable essay of a literary cast--in 1833 Hazlitt died in 1830, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834 By that time Carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four it is probable that Carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical, had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas. Space forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. All that can be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of English criticism as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they modified its methods and its aims.