Indeed, the Professor’s critical dicta are as amazing as his facts. We have only space for one or two samples. Cowley’s _Anacreontics_ are “not very far below Milton”(!) Dr. Donne was “the most gifted man of letters next to Shakespeare.” Where Bacon, where Ben Jonson, where Milton are to stand is not indicated. Akenside’s stilted and frigid _Odes_ “fall not so far short of Collins.” We wonder what Mr. Saintsbury’s criterion of poetry can be. But we forget, with that criterion he has furnished us. On page 732, speaking of “a story about a hearer who knew no English, but knew Tennyson to be a poet by the hearing,” he adds that “the story is probable and valuable, or rather invaluable, for it points to the best if not the only criterion of poetry.” And this is a critic! We would exhort the Professor to ponder well Pope’s lines: “But most by numbers judge a poet’s song, * * * * * In the bright muse, tho’ thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear.” On page 734 we are told Browning’s _James Lee_--the Professor probably means _James Lee’s Wife_--is amongst “the greatest poems of the century.” On Wordsworth’s line, judged not in relation to its context, but as a single verse--“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”--we have the following as commentary: “Even Shakespeare, even Shelley have little more of the echoing detonation, the auroral light of true poetry”; very “echoing,” very “detonating”--the rhythm of “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Mr. Saintsbury’s notions of what constitutes detonation and auroral light in poetry appear to resemble his notions of what constitutes eloquence in prose. Nothing, we may add in passing, is more amusing in this volume than Mr. Saintsbury’s cool assumption of equality as a critical authority with such a critic as Matthew Arnold, whom he sometimes patronises, sometimes corrects, and sometimes assails. The Professor does not show to advantage on these occasions, and he leaves us with the impression that if “Mr. Arnold’s criticism is piecemeal, arbitrary, fantastic, and insane,” the criticism which appears, where it is not mere nonsense, to take its touchstones, its standards, and its canons from those of the average Philistine is, after all, a very poor substitute. But enough of Mr. Saintsbury’s “criticism,” which is, almost uniformly, as absurd in what it praises as in what it censures.