While Symons has written on all the arts, the sphere of Johnson has been more limited to traditional English lines. Johnson attempts no broad æsthetical system like the former. All that he does is to illuminate the writer of whom he is speaking. And his little essays, eminent in their un-English lucidity, their scrupulous nicety, their conscious and deliberate beauty, adding to our _belles lettres_ a classical execution and finish (which perfection accounts perhaps for the classical smallness of his bookmaking) have all the bewildering charm of a born stylist. Certain of his phrases linger in the mind like music. ‘Many a sad half-murmured thought of Pascal, many a deep and plangent utterance of Lucretius.’ Or the line: ‘The face whose changes dominate my heart.’ Like the styles of Newman and Pater, on which his own is founded, he is singularly allusive. He cites critics by chapter and verse like an advocate defending a case. In fact, as in his critical _magnum opus_, _The Art of Thomas Hardy_, he is amazingly judicial. It is, too, since he is essentially academic, to the older critics he prefers to turn for guidance. As he writes: ‘Flaubert and Baudelaire and Gautier, Hennequin and M. Zola and M. Mallarmé, with all their colleagues or exponents, may sometimes be set aside, and suffer us to hear Quintilian or Ben Jonson, Cicero or Dryden.’ This habit sometimes makes him strenuous reading, particularly in longer criticisms like _The Art of Thomas Hardy_. We grow weary of all this quotative authority. Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_ cannot be brought into every-day literary criticism. We want to hear more of Lionel Johnson’s own direct opinions and less of these selected passages from his library. So it is to those passages where Johnson is most himself we turn in _The Art of Thomas Hardy_, which, in spite of its academicism and the youthfulness of its author, remains a genuine piece of sound critical work. The delightful imagery of the prose in such passages is often very illuminating, as in this paragraph: