This, indeed, is one of the first things to strike us in passing from the old criticism to the new. The _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ plunge straight into the business of the moment. From the first instant--with "This will never do"--the Reviewer poses as the critic, or rather as the accuser. Not so Coleridge and Hazlitt. Like the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_, they undertake to discourse on individual poets. Unlike them, each opens his enquiry with the previous question-a question that seems to have found no lodgment in the mind of the Reviewers--What is poetry? Further than this. Hazlitt, in a passage of incomparably greater force than any recorded utterance of Coleridge, makes it his task to trace poetry to the deepest and most universal springs of human nature; asserts boldly that it is poetry which, in the strictest sense, is "the life of all of us"; and calls on each one of us to assert his birthright by enjoying it. It is in virtue of the poet latent in him, that the plain man has the power to become a critic. Starting then from the question as just stated: Is it within the mind of the individual poet, or without it, that the standard of judgment should be sought?--neither Coleridge nor Hazlitt could have any doubt as to the answer. It is not, they would tell us, in the individual work but in the nature of poetry--of poetry as written large in the common instincts of all men no less than in the particular achievement of exceptional artists--that the test of poetic beauty must be discovered. The opposite view, doubtless, finds some countenance in the precepts, if not the example, of Goethe. But, when pressed to extremes, it is neither more nor less than the impressionist conception of criticism transferred to the creative faculty; and, like its counterpart, is liable to the objection that the impression of one poet, so long as it is sincerely rendered, is as good as the impression of another. It is the abdication of art, as the other is the abdication of criticism. Yet Hazlitt also--for, leaving Coleridge, we may now confine ourselves to him--is open to attack. His fine critical powers were marred by the strain of bitterness in his nature. And the result is that his judgment on many poets, and notably the poets of his own day, too often sounds like an intelligent version of the _Edinburgh_ or the _Quarterly_. Or, to speak more accurately, he betrays some tendency to return to principles which, though assuredly applied in a more generous spirit, are at bottom hardly to be distinguished from the principles of Johnson. He too has his "indispensable laws", or something very like them. He too has his bills of exclusion and his list of proscriptions. The poetry of earth, he more than suspects, is for ever dead; after Milton, no claimant is admitted to anything more substantial than a courtesy title. This, no doubt, was in part due to his morose temper; but it was partly also the result of the imperfect method with which he started.