Another absurdity, not less monstrous, in these regulations, is the absence of all provision for instruction in the principles of criticism. There is indeed an unmeaning clause about the history of criticism, and of style in verse and prose, being included in the examination; but as nothing is specified, and as no work on criticism, with the exception of Dryden’s _Discourse on Epic Poetry_, and Johnson’s _Lives_ (of eighteenth-century poets),[8] is included in the books prescribed for special study, it is plain that this important subject has no place. Why it should not have occurred to these legislators to substitute, say, for Goldsmith’s _Citizen of the World_ and Burke’s _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_, some work which would at least have opened the eyes of the literary professors of the future to the existence of philosophical criticism, is certainly odd. Had they prescribed select essays from Hume; and Shaftesbury’s _Advice to an Author_, or Campbell’s _Philosophy of Rhetoric_, or Burke’s _Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful_, or even the critical portions of Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_, with the two essays of Wordsworth, it would have been something. But the truth is that, as they have excluded, except from the optional subjects, all literatures but the English, one absurdity has involved them in another. The course for the literary education of our future professors, proceeding on the principle that they need know no language but Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, has necessitated the elimination of all the great masterpieces of critical literature. As they are assumed to know no Greek, they can have no serious instruction in such works as Aristotle’s _Poetic_ and _Rhetoric_, and in the _Treatise on the Sublime_. As they are assumed to know no Latin, they can have no instruction in Roman criticism. On the same principle such works as Lessing’s _Laocoon_ and _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_, Schiller’s Æsthetical Letters and Essays, Villemain’s Lectures, and Sainte-Beuve’s Essays, can find no place in their curriculum of study. And so it comes to pass that Dryden’s _Discourse on Epic Poetry_ and Johnson’s _Lives_ of the eighteenth-century poets, represent--_proh pudor!_--the course in Criticism.