[Footnote 8: It is amusing to notice how carefully the greater part of what is most precious and instructive in Johnson’s work, the lives namely of Cowley and Dryden, and the noble critique of _Paradise Lost_, is expressly excluded, and the greater part of what is most trivial, and regarded by himself as trivial, the lives of the minor poets of the eighteenth century, selected instead. Macaulay ranks the lives of Cowley and Dryden, with that of Pope, as the masterpieces of the work; and Johnson himself considered the life of Cowley to be the best.] ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES[9] II. TEXT BOOKS [Footnote 9: Shelley’s _Adonais_, edited with introduction and notes by William Michael Rossetti. (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press.)] If any proof were needed of what has been insisted on over and over again, that, until the Universities provide adequately for the proper study of English Literature--for the study of it side by side with Classical Literature--there will be small hope of its finding competent critics and interpreters, it would be afforded by the volume before us. For this volume the delegates of the Oxford University Press are responsible; and in allowing it their _imprimatur_ they have been guilty of a very grave error. No such standard of editing would have been tolerated in any other subject in which they undertake to provide books. A work pertaining to Classics, to History, to Philosophy, to Science, marked by corresponding deficiencies, would have been suppressed at once, until those deficiencies had been supplied. To Mr. Rossetti himself we attach no blame. What he was competent to do he has, for the most part, done well and conscientiously,--conscientiously, as may be judged from the fact that, while the poem itself occupies twenty pages in large type, Mr. Rossetti’s dissertations and notes occupy one hundred and twenty-eight in small type. It was, indeed, his misfortune, rather than his fault, to be entrusted with a work which required a peculiar qualification, an intimate acquaintance, that is to say, with Classical Literature. That he has no pretension to this is abundantly plain from his Introduction and from every page of his notes.