A writer, therefore, who tries to recall criticism to a sense of its responsibilities and true functions deserves all sympathy and encouragement. It is refreshing to turn from the sort of thing to which we have referred to such a work as Mr. Worsfold has given us. His design is “to present an account of the main principles of literary criticism,” which he professes to trace from Plato to Matthew Arnold. Mr. Worsfold’s thesis simply stated is that criticism--and he deals with criticism chiefly in its application to poetry--has passed successively through five stages. With the Greeks it concerned itself principally with form. “The first question it asked with them was not, as with us, What is the thought? but What is the form?” By Addison--for here Mr. Worsfold makes a prodigious leap over some twenty centuries--it was furnished with a new test, and it asked, How does a given poem affect the imagination? By Lessing a return was made to the formal criticism of the ancients, but he adopted also Addison’s criterion, and added definiteness to it. Victor Cousin followed in 1818 with his lectures, entitled, _Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien_, and enlarged the boundaries of the science by a complete theory of beauty and art, developed mainly out of Plato. Lastly came Matthew Arnold, who extended the realm still further, by the addition of certain other important touchstones of poetic excellence. At the present time a gradual limitation of the scope of its rules, and a gradual extension of the scope of its principles, are the tendencies most discernible in criticism. “An enlightened criticism no longer aims at directing the artist by formulating rules which, if they were valid, would only tend to obliterate the distinction between the fine and the technical arts. It allows him to work by whatever methods he may choose, and it is content to estimate his merit not by reference to his method but by reference to his achievement, as measured by principles of universal validity.”