The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and taste, was called to lead in this newly levied army, was not far from being the most important of all; and it was certainly that of all which required the most thorough reformation of staff, _morale_,[3] and tactics. The English literary criticism of 1830-1860, speaking in round numbers, is curiously and to this day rather unintelligibly bad. There is, no doubt, no set of matters in which it is less safe to generalise than in matters literary, and this is by no means the only instance in which the seemingly natural anticipation that a period of great criticism will follow a period of great creation is falsified. But it most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of the great Romantic period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors. The philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that of De Quincey to incessant divergences of "rigmarole," being formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen --not novelists--of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay, were indeed both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in the one case, the "shadow of Frederick" in the other, had cut short their critical careers: and presumptuous as the statement may seem, it may be questioned whether either had been a great critic--in criticism pure and simple--of literature.