ABSTRACT
“ We enter on burning ground,” says Mr. Arnold in one of those luminous critical essays which are so provocative and so helpful;—“we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion.” And that is why, as the great critic has told us, with as much sagacity as iteration, Time is the true test, and the judgments of the High Court are taken, for so wearisome a period, to avizandum. The justice of the remark is never mort evident than when we consider the fallibility of contemporary criticism. If the writer has a new gospel to preach, or what looks like a new gospel, there is 2the natural alienation of those who prefer the old order of ideas, or at least the same ideas in their old setting. If the writer does not pretend to offer anything new, and openly avows that he has nothing to say but what has been said before, only not quite in the same manner, or with quite the same precision, there is the danger that the value of his work may be lost sight of, or his profession of conservatism put down to him as a want of originality.
