the intellect; to rise above one’s personal affinities is as much as to rise above one’s personal prejudices and superstitions. The boy of a certain stamp has an affinity for the dime novel; if we can lift him to an appreciation of Scott, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, how have we emancipated his taste! So that Brunetière was right in saying that, in art and literature, the beginning of wisdom is to distrust what we like. _Distrust_, not repudiate. Let us examine first and see upon what grounds we like it,--see if we _ought_ to like it; see if it is akin to that which is of permanent value in the world’s best thought. A French critic tells a story of a man who sat cool and unmoved under a sermon that made the people about him shed torrents of tears, and who excused himself by saying, “I do not belong to this parish.” One’s tastes must be broader than one’s parish. I suppose any of our religious brethren would feel a little shy of weeping in the church of a religious denomination not his own. Our religion is no more emancipated than are our tastes. Lowell says there are born Popists and born Wordsworthians; but the more these types can get out of their limitations and appreciate one another, the more they are emancipated. V RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM I The criticism of criticism is one of the marked literary characteristics of the last ten or fifteen years, both in this country and in Europe. It is seen in France in Brunetière’s essays and in Hennequin’s “Scientific Criticism;” in England in the recent work of Wm. B. Wordsfold on the “Principles of Criticism” and in Mr. John M. Robertson’s two volumes of “Essays toward a Critical Method;” in this country in Mr. Howells’s “Criticism and Fiction,” in Prof. Johnson’s “Elements of Criticism” and in the still more recent work of Professor Sears on “Methods and Principles of Criticism,” besides the numerous discussions of the subject in the magazines and literary journals.