We wish we had space to comment on Professor Butcher’s admirable, though somewhat defective, chapter on the dawn of Romanticism in Greek poetry, but we must forbear, and repeat our thanks to him for a book full of interest and instruction, not the least of its charms being the lively and graceful style in which it is written. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 35: This blow has, since these words were written, been inflicted. See _supra_ pp. 45-75.] [Footnote 36: So he says, _Poet._, xxvi., of epic and tragedy, that each ought not to produce any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it (δει γαρ ου την τυχουσαν ἡδονην ποιειν αυτας αλλα την ειρημενην, _i.e._ οικειαν).] THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM[37] [Footnote 37: _The Principles of Criticism. An Introduction to the Study of Literature._ By W. Basil Worsfold. London: Allen.] Bishop Warburton said that there were two things which every man thought himself competent to do, to manage a small farm and to drive a whisky. Had Warburton lived in our time, he would probably have added a third--to set up for a critic. What the author of the best critical treatise in the Greek language pronounced to be the final fruit of long experience, culture, and study, directed and illumined by certain natural qualifications, has now come to be represented by the idle and irresponsible gossip of any one who can gossip agreeably. Agreeable gossip and good criticism are, as Sainte-Beuve and others have shown, far from being incompatible, the misfortune is that they should be confounded; but confounded they are, and the confusion is the curse of current literature. We have recently observed, with concern, that the rubbish which used formerly to be shot into novels and poems is now being shot into criticism, and that there appears to be a growing impression that the accomplishments which qualify young men for spinning cobwebs in fiction and manufacturing versicles can, with a little management, serve to set them up as critics. There is not much more difficulty in forming an opinion about a book than there is in reading it, and as criticism in the hands of these fribbles becomes little more than the dithyrambic expression of that opinion, the profession of criticism is one in which it is delightfully easy to graduate. It requires neither learning nor knowledge, neither culture nor discipline. It is neither science nor art; it is the gift of nature, a sort of “lyric inspiration.” With principles, with touchstones, with standards, it has nothing whatever to do. Its business is to declaim, to coin phrases, to juggle with fancies and to say “good things.”