It is some consolation to reflect that this critical school of
poetry improves as the science of criticism improves; and that
the science of criticism, like every other science, is constantly
tending towards perfection. As experiments are multiplied,
principles are better understood.

In some countries, in our own for example, there has been an
interval between the downfall of the creative school and the rise
of the critical, a period during which imagination has been in
its decrepitude, and taste in its infancy. Such a revolutionary
interregnum as this will be deformed by every species of
extravagance.

The first victory of good taste is over the bombast and conceits
which deform such times as these. But criticism is still in a
very imperfect state. What is accidental is for a long time
confounded with what is essential. General theories are drawn
from detached facts. How many hours the action of a play may be
allowed to occupy,--how many similes an Epic Poet may introduce
into his first book,--whether a piece, which is acknowledged to
have a beginning and an end, may not be without a middle, and
other questions as puerile as these, formerly occupied the
attention of men of letters in France, and even in this country.
Poets, in such circumstances as these, exhibit all the narrowness
and feebleness of the criticism by which their manner has been
fashioned. From outrageous absurdity they are preserved indeed
by their timidity. But they perpetually sacrifice nature and
reason to arbitrary canons of taste. In their eagerness to avoid
the mala prohibita of a foolish code, they are perpetually