old, he finds the true external canon of sublimity. The verdict lies not
with contemporaries, but with the large public, not with the little set
of dilettanti, but must be spoken by all. Such verdicts assign the crown
to Shakespeare and Molière, to Homer and Cervantes; we should not
clamorously anticipate this favourable judgment for Bryant or Emerson,
nor for the greatest of our own contemporaries. Boileau so much
misconceived these lofty ideas that he regarded “Longinus’s” judgment as
solely that “of good sense,” and held that, in his time, “nothing was
good or bad till he had spoken.” But there is far more than good sense,
there is high poetic imagination and moral greatness, in the criticism
of our author, who certainly would have rejected Boileau’s compliment
when he selects Longinus as a literary dictator.

Indeed we almost grudge our author’s choice of a subject. He who wrote
that “it was not in nature’s plan for us, her children, to be base and
ignoble; no, she brought us into life as into some great field of
contest,” should have had another field of contest than literary
criticism. It is almost a pity that we have to doubt the tradition,
according to which our author was Longinus, and, being but a
rhetorician, greatly dared and bravely died. Taking literature for his
theme, he wanders away into grammar, into considerations of tropes and
figures, plurals and singulars, trumpery mechanical pedantries, as we
think now, to whom grammar is no longer, as of old, “a new invented
game.” Moreover, he has to give examples of the faults opposed to
sublimity, he has to dive into and search the bathos, to dally over
examples of the bombastic, the over-wrought, the puerile. These faults
are not the sins of “minds generous and aspiring,” and we have them with
us always. The additions to Boileau’s preface (Paris, 1772) contain
abundance of examples of faults from Voiture, Mascaron, Bossuet,
selected by M. de St. Marc, who no doubt found abundance of