their terra-cotta, he found the secret of quite another country than the Greece of the historian. It was always his pleasure to begin where others had ended, and criticism rather than creation came to mean for him the delicate adventures of the intellect, such a life as was the best part of his own. And so criticism became creation for him, building its impressions into things beautiful in themselves, and transforming the life of the critic into something no less delightful than the subjects of his contemplation. Such a theory of criticism had not been stated before his time, though there had been such critics and such criticism. The abstract usually follows the concrete, and the practice dictates the precept. Wilde had in his mind as he wrote such fine flaming things as Swinburne's study of Blake, and such slow-moving magnificent pageants as "Marius the Epicurean," in which Pater had criticized a century of manners and ideas. And, perhaps, he did not forget his own 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' that was "a study in green," as well as a summary of the life and talents of Janus Weathercock of The London Magazine. Beautiful criticism had been made as long ago as when Sidney wrote of the "blind crowder," whose song moved his heart like the sound of a trumpet. But men had not known what they were doing, and made lovely things with quite another purpose. Coleridge set the key for many men's playing when he said that "the ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgments on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated." And Mr. Arthur Symons, who has in our own day made fine critical things, yet says, quite humbly, that "the aim of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of a writer," and again, that "criticism is a valuation of forces." Hazlitt was no further from the truth when he wrote, in a pleasant, rather malicious article on the critics of his time, that "a genuine criticism should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work." Criticism, as Wilde saw it, was free to do all these things, but had a further duty to itself. Hazlitt, and those who read him in his own day, thought that he was giving opinions, talking, reflecting "the soul and body of a work"; but it is for himself that we read him now, and his subjects and opinions matter little beside the gusto and the fresh wind of the chalk downs that make his essays things in themselves and fit for such criticism as he liked. Wainewright too, who learnt from Hazlitt, "deals," as Wilde saw, "with his impressions of the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate these impressions into words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for his imaginative and mental effect." But he did not say so, and perhaps Walter Pater's essays were the first to make it impossible not to