Criticism should not be set off too sharply from other forms of literary expression. It has no special rights, privileges, and authority; and at the same time it has no special disabilities that consign it to a secondary place in the divisions of literature. In any unit of art, a sonnet or an epic, a short story or a novel, a little review or a history of aesthetics, a man is trying to say something. And the value of what he says must, of course, depend partly on the essential interest of his subject; but it depends to a greater extent on the skill with which he puts words together, creates interest in himself. Arnold's essay on Keats is less Keats than Arnold. It could not have been if Keats had not existed. But the beauty of that sequence of words, that essay in criticism, is due to the genius of Arnold. Francis Thompson on Shelley adds no cubit to the stature of Shelley, but Thompson's interpretation is a marvellous piece of poetic prose which cannot be deducted without enormous loss from the works of Thompson, from English criticism. We read Pater on Coleridge, not for Coleridge but for Pater, and we read Coleridge for Coleridge, not for Shakespeare. Thackeray's lecture on Swift, which is full of animosity and miscomprehension, is a well-written revelation of Thackeray. Trollope's book on Thackeray, which is full of friendship and admiration, is an ill-written revelation of Trollope. Some men of great ability, like Trollope, who have written good books themselves, lack the faculty, whatever it may be, of writing in an entertaining fashion about the books of other men. Swinburne is a striking example. His knowledge of literature was immense, and he had the enthusiasms and contempts that make the critical impulse; but except when the poet in him seized the pen and made a passage of lyrical prose, his excursions into criticism are bewildering and difficult to read. His sonnets on Dickens, Lamb, and the Elizabethans are worth more than all his prose. On the other hand, Lamb, who wrote like an angel about the Elizabethan dramatists, failed completely as a dramatist.