We respect the talents of Mr. Mathews, but must dissent from nearly all that he here says. The species of “review” which he designates as the “characteristic growth of the nineteenth century” is only the growth of the last twenty or thirty years _in Great Britain_. The French Reviews, for example, which are _not_ anonymous, are very different things, and preserve the _unique_ spirit of true criticism. And what need we say of the Germans?—what of Winkelmann, of Novalis, of Schelling, of Göethe, of Augustus William, and of Frederick Schlegel?—that their magnificent _critiques raisonnées_ differ from those of Kaimes, of Johnson, and of Blair, in principle not at all, (for the principles of these artists will not fail until Nature herself expires,) but solely in their more careful elaboration, their greater thoroughness, their more profound analysis and application of the principles themselves. That a criticism “_now_” should be different in spirit, as Mr. Mathews supposes, from a criticism at any previous period, is to insinuate a charge of variability in laws that cannot vary—the laws of man’s heart and intellect—for these are the sole basis upon which the true critical art is established. And this art “_now_” no more than in the days of the “Dunciad,” can, without neglect of its duty, “dismiss errors of grammar,” or “hand over an imperfect rhyme or a false quantity to the proof-reader.” What is meant by a “test of opinion” in the connexion here given the words by Mr. M., we do not comprehend as clearly as we could desire. By this phrase we are as completely enveloped in doubt as was Mirabeau in the castle of _If_. To our imperfect appreciation it seems to form a portion of that general vagueness which is the _tone_ of the whole philosophy at this point:—but all that which our journalist describes a criticism to be, is all that which we sturdily maintain it _is not_. Criticism is _not_, we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art novel, nor a dialogue. In fact, it _can be_ nothing in the world but—a criticism. But if it were all that Arcturus imagines, it is not very clear why it might not be equally “imaginative” or “dramatic”—a romance or a melo-drama, or both. That it would be a farce cannot be doubted.