It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word—disinterestedness. Mr. James Russell Lowell[2] has applied Mr. Matthew Arnold’s rule with rare fidelity in his essays, just published, on Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, and Keats. His estimate of the two greatest of modern poets, especially the paper on Dante, is calculated to attract general attention, and to arouse, we apprehend, some acrid sentiment in a certain class of literary butterflies who are accustomed to sip or decline according to the theological character of the garden. It requires considerable courage to place Dante above all his rivals and salute him as “The loftiest of poets!” in an hour when poetry has lost the qualities that made Dante lofty and Milton grand, and when the epithet “Catholic,” which Dante loved and Milton hated, has become again a reproach. Lowell’s consideration of both is characterized by disinterestedness as to time, religion, politics, and literature; and the sincere student who casts aside his prejudices, like his hat, when he approaches the temples that enshrine so much of divinity as God deposited in the souls of the Florentine and the Puritan, will find it difficult to dissent from the judgment of Lowell upon their individuality, their inspiration, or their art. Lowell is peculiarly adapted to the form of literature, semi-critical, semi-creative, in which he has recently distinguished himself. We believe his essay on Dante to be the most successfully-accomplished task which he has yet undertaken; and the cultivated American public should thank one who has amused and diverted it as well as he has done for the solid instruction which this volume conveys in a style at once scholarly, fresh, and refined. Lowell’s mental temperament is admirably adapted for the mirroring of poets’ minds. Himself a genuine poet, without ambition above his capacity, his agile fancy discerns the quicker and appreciates more intensely the imagination of epic souls; while his critical faculty, naturally acute, has the additional advantage of a keen sense of humor, which enables him to discover more readily the incongruous, and is, therefore, an invaluable assistant in literary discrimination.