which prevailed in Pugin’s day, and which finds its orthodox expression in Parker’s _Glossary_ and the elementary works of Bloxam and Rickman. Sensitiveness or natural “taste,” apart from principle, is, in art, what love is apart from truth in morals. The stronger it is, the further it is likely to go wrong. Nothing can be more tenderly “felt” than a school of painting which is now much in favour; but, for want of knowledge and masculine principle, it has come to delight in representing ugliness and corruption in place of health and beauty. Venus or Hebe becomes, in its hands, nothing but a _Dame aux Camélias_ in the last stage of moral and physical deterioration. A few infallible and, when once uttered, self-evident principles would at once put a stop to this sort of representation among artists; and the public would soon learn to be repelled by what now most attracts them, being thenceforward guided by a critical conscience, which is the condition of “_good_ taste.” There is little that is conclusive or fruitful in any of the criticism of the present day. The very name that it has chosen, “Æsthetics,” contains an implied admission of its lack of virility or principle. We do not think of Lessing’s _Laocoön_, which is one of the finest pieces of critical writing in the world, as belonging to “Æsthetics”; and, like it, the critical sayings of Goethe and Coleridge seem to appertain to a science deserving a nobler name--a science in which truth stands first and feeling second, and of which the conclusions are demonstrable and irreversible. A critic of the present day, in attempting to describe the difference between the usual construction of a passage by Fletcher and one by Shakespeare, would beat helplessly about the bush, telling us many things about the different sorts of feelings awakened by the one and by the other, and concluding, and desiring to conclude, nothing. Coleridge in a single sentence defines the difference, and establishes Shakespeare’s immeasurable superiority with the clearness and finality of a mathematical statement; and the delight of the reader of Shakespeare is for ever heightened because it is less than before a zeal without knowledge.