rest assured that however much hostile criticism may have pained an
author, it has never inflicted a permanent injury upon a good book. If
there appear to be works that have been thus more or less obscured, the
fault will probably be found not in the critic but in the works
themselves. According to this agreeable theory, which we would all fain
believe, the triumph of the ignorant or malevolent critic cannot endure;
sooner or later the author's merit will be recognized and he will come
into his own.

The present volume does not attempt to fulfill the conditions suggested
by Dr. Matthews and Mr. Collins. A history of contemporary criticism of
famous authors would be a more ambitious undertaking, necessitating an
extensive apparatus of notes and references. It seeks merely to gather a
number of interesting anomalies of criticism--reviews of famous poems
and famous poets differing more or less from the modern consensus of
opinion concerning those poems and their authors. Although most of the
chosen reviews are unfavorable, several others have been selected to
afford evidence of an early appreciation of certain poets. A few
unexpectedly favorable notices, such as the _Monthly Review's_ critique
of Browning's _Sordello_, are printed because they appear to be unique.
The chief criterion in selecting these reviews (apart from the effort to
represent most of the periodicals and the principal poets between Gray
and Browning) has been that of interest to the modern reader. In most
cases, criticisms of a writer's earlier works were preferred as more
likely to be spontaneous and uninfluenced by his growing literary
reputation. Thus the volume does not attempt to trace the development of
English critical methods, nor to supply a hand-book of representative
English criticism; it offers merely a selection of bygone but readable
reviews--what the critics thought, or, in some cases, pretended to
think, of works of poets whom we have since held in honorable esteem.