Mr. Worsfold has very properly drawn attention to the fine passage about poetry in the second book of Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_, but he says not a word about Sidney’s remarkable treatise, one of the most charming contributions to the criticism of poetry which has ever been made, or about the admirable remarks in Ben Jonson’s _Discoveries_. The interest of Elizabethan criticism, as represented by these works--and they are the only works on this subject of any value produced during the Elizabethan period--lies partly in its return to Aristotelian canons, and partly in the importance which, in accordance with the ancients, it attaches to the didactic element in poetry. This is expressed very eloquently in Ben Jonson’s dedication of the _Fox_:-- “If men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of a man’s being the good poet without being first the good man,--he that is able to inform young men to all good discipline, inflame young men to all good virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to their first state, that comes forth the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human.” This was precisely Spenser’s conception of one of the chief functions of poetry. Thus the Elizabethan critics, who were followed afterwards by Milton, if they did not formally discuss the relation of æsthetic to ethic, insisted on their essential connection in the higher forms of poetry. Even in the succeeding age, when poetry lost all its high seriousness and much of its moral dignity, criticism, if it did not always insist on the application of this test, still retained it. Dryden could write, “I am satisfied if verse cause delight, for delight is the chief, if not the only end, of poesy”; but in adding “instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights,” he half corrected his former statement, and, indeed, simply reverted to what Aristophanes, Ben Jonson, and Milton would have been the first to admit.