neteenth century is remarkable for the development of a new and
valuable type of critical prose writing. If we except the isolated work of
Dryden and of Addison, it is safe to say that literary criticism, in its
modern sense, was hardly known in England until about the year 1825. Such
criticism as existed seems to us now to have been largely the result of
personal opinion or prejudice. Indeed we could hardly expect anything else
before some systematic study of our literature as a whole had been
attempted. In one age a poem was called good or bad according as it
followed or ran counter to so-called classic rules; in another we have the
dogmatism of Dr. Johnson; in a third the personal judgment of Lockhart and
the editors of the _Edinburgh Review_ and the _Quarterly_, who so violently
abused Keats and the Lake poets in the name of criticism. Early in the
nineteenth century there arose a new school of criticism which was guided
by knowledge of literature, on the one hand, and by what one might call the
fear of God on the other. The latter element showed itself in a profound
human sympathy,--the essence of the romantic movement,--and its importance
was summed up by De Quincey when he said, "Not to sympathize is not to
understand." These new critics, with abundant reverence for past masters,
could still lay aside the dogmatism and prejudice which marked Johnson and
the magazine editors, and read sympathetically the work of a new author,
with the sole idea of finding what he had contributed, or tried to
contribute, to the magnificent total of our literature. Coleridge, Hunt,
Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leaders in this new and immensely
important development; and we must not forget the importance of the new
periodicals, like the _Londen Magazine,_ founded in 1820, in which Lamb, De
Quincey, and Carlyle found their first real encouragement.

Of Coleridge's _Biographica Literaria_ and his _Lectures on Shakespeare_ we
have already spoken. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) wrote continuously for more
than thirty years, as editor and essayist; and his chief object seems to
have been to make good literature known and appreciated. William Hazlitt
(1778-1830), in a long series of lectures and essays, treated all reading
as a kind of romantic journey into new and pleasant countries. To his work
largely, with that of Lamb, was due the new interest in Elizabethan
literature, which so strongly influenced Keats's last and best volume of
poet