In the days of our forefathers, a reader of literary tastes, if he wished to acquaint himself with an English classic, went to the fountain head and read Spenser or Milton, Pope or Addison for himself. If he desired to know what criticism had said about them, he had criticism of authority at hand, and he consulted it. In our day it is about an even chance whether the ordinary reader would trouble himself to turn to the originals or not: he would probably content himself with the notices of them in some current manual of English Literature, or with some essay or monograph. Now, in the myriads of such publications, in vogue or out of vogue, knocked under by their successors or scuffling with their contemporaries, he might have the luck to light on a good guide; he might have the luck to light on Dean Church, or Mark Pattison, or Mr. Leslie Stephen, or Professor Courthope, or Mr. Frederic Harrison; but he is much more likely to make his way to a luminary in the last well-puffed “series.” The first article in the creed of the modern book-maker seems to be that the appearance or existence of a good book is a sufficient justification for the production of a bad one to take its place. An excellent monograph is published, and is popular. This is the signal for the manufacture of half a dozen inferior ones, which are mutually destructive, and serve no end except to substitute bad books for a good one, and to make the good one forgotten. Again, a work which has long been classical in criticism is assumed not to be “up to date,” and is either edited on this hypothesis, or we have another substituted for it. This in turn yields its vogue--for fashions change quickly in modern taste--to a similar experiment, till a third is announced. Of the relation of criticism to principles, or indeed to anything else but to their own whims or impressions, these iconoclasts appear to be profoundly unaware. It requires, needless to say, the utmost wariness and care on the part of those who regulate, and on the part of those who are engaged in, education, to keep this inferior literature in its place. If it were allowed to make its way authoritatively into our schools and Universities, or indeed into any of our educational institutions, the consequences would be most disastrous. It is not so much that it would disseminate error as that it would become influential in more serious ways, æsthetically in its influence on taste, morally in its influence on tone and character, intellectually in lowering the whole standard of aim and attainment in studies.