of humor, and then
illustrated its generalization by the practice of the poets. It could
thereby pride itself on going back of the rules to the fundamental laws of
human nature. Kames's Elements of Criticism, written in 1761, became a
work of standard reference, though it did not impose on the great critics.
In commending it Dr. Johnson was careful to remark, "I do not mean that he
has taught us anything; but he has told us old things in a new way."[37]
But in general Kames was considered a safer guide than the enthusiastic
Longinus, who throughout the century was looked upon with distrust.
"Instead of shewing for what reason a sentiment or image is sublime, and
discovering the secret power by which they affect a reader with pleasure,
he is ever intent on producing something sublime _himself_, and strokes of
his own eloquence." So runs the complaint of Joseph Warton.[38] The
distrust was not without ground. The danger that the method of Longinus in
the hands of ungifted writers would become a cloak for critical ignorance
and degenerate into empty bluster was already apparent.[39] Only rarely
was there a reader who could distinguish between the false and the true
application of the method. Gibbon did it in a passage which impressed
itself upon the younger critics of Hazlitt's generation. "I was acquainted
only with two ways of criticising a beautiful passage: the one, to shew,
by an exact anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of it, and whence they
sprung; the other, an idle exclamation, or a general encomium, which
leaves nothing behind it. Longinus has shewn me that there is a third. He
tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and tells them with such
energy, that he communicates them."[40] That vital element, the
commentator's power of communicating his own feelings, constituting as it
does the difference between phrase-making and valuable criticism, did not
become prominent in English literature before the nineteenth century.

The official criticism of the early nineteenth century as represented by
the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, derives its descent directly from
the eighteenth. Whatever the Government might have thought of the politics
of the Edinburgh, its literary outlook remained unexceptionably orthodox.
Jeffrey's "Essay on Beauty" is a direct copy of Alison's "Essay on Taste."
Much as Dr. Johnson in the preceding age, Jeffrey prided himself on the
moral tendency of his criticism--a morality which consisted