with Milton that the chastening influence of the ancients first makes
itself definitely felt. But Milton was no less alive to the fervour
than to the self-mastery of his classical models. And it was not till
the Restoration that "correctness" was recognized as the highest, if
not the only, quality of the ancients, or accepted as the one worthy
object of poetic effort. For more than a century correctness remained
the idol both of poetry and of criticism in England; and nothing less
than the furious onslaught of the Lyrical Ballads was needed to
overthrow it. Then the floodgates were opened. A new era both of poetic
and critical energy had dawned.

Thus the history of English criticism, like that of English literature,
divides itself roughly into three periods. The first is the period of
the Elizabethans and of Milton; the second is from the Restoration to
the French Revolution; the third from the Revolution to the present
day. The typical critic of the first period is Sidney; Dryden opens
and Johnson closes the second; the third, a period of far more varied
tendencies than either of the others, is perhaps most fitly represented
by Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. It will be the aim of the following
pages to sketch the broader outlines of the course that critical inquiry
has taken in each.

I. The first thing that strikes us in the early attempts of criticism
is that its problems are to a large extent remote from those which
have engrossed critics of more recent times. There is little attempt
to appraise accurately the worth of individual authors; still less,
to find out the secret of their power, or to lay bare the hidden lines
of thought on which their imagination had set itself to work. The first
aim both of Puttenham and of Webbe, the pioneers of Elizabethan
criticism, was either to classify writers according to the subjects