Till the beginning of the present century, criticism in England had remained a very simple thing. When judgment had once been passed, for good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors. The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected. It may be said--an English critic of the eighteenth century would undoubtedly have said--that these, after all, are but methods; better, possibly, than other methods; but still no more than means to an end-- the eternal end of criticism, which is to appraise and to classify. The view is disputable enough. It leaves out of sight all that criticism--the criticism of literature and art--has done to throw light upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. All these things are included in the scope of the historical and comparative methods; and all of them stand entirely apart from the need to judge or classify the works of individual poets. But, for the moment, such wider considerations may be put aside, and the objection weighed on its own merits. It must then be answered that, without comparison and without the appeal to history, even to judge and classify reasonably would be impossible; and hence that, however much we narrow the scope of criticism, these two methods--or rather, two aspects of the same method--must still find place within its range. For, failing them, the critic in search of a standard--and without some standard or criterion there can be no such thing as criticism--is left with but two possible alternatives. He must either appeal to some absolute standard--the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former was the method of Johnson; the latter, of the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_. Each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken down.