I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the special student
of comparative literature--namely, that it is sometimes in the minor
writings of an age, where the bias of personal genius is not strongly
felt, that the general phenomena of the time are most clearly
observed. _The Amazon Queen_ is in rhymed verse, because in 1667
this was the fashionable form for dramatic poetry; _Sertorius_ is
in regular and somewhat restrained blank verse, because in 1679 the
fashion had once more chopped round. What in Dryden or Otway might be
the force of originality may be safely taken as the drift of the age
in these imitative and floating nonentities.

A CENSOR OF POETS

The Lives of The Most Famous English Poets, _or the Honour of
Parnassus; in a Brief Essay of the Works and Writings of above Two
Hundred of them, from the Time of K. William the Conqueror, to the
Reign of His Present Majesty King James II. Written by William
Winstanley. Licensed June 16, 1686. London, Printed by H. Clark, for
Samuel Manship at the Sign of the Black Bull in Cornhil,_ 1687.

A maxim which it would be well for ambitious critics to chalk up on
the walls of their workshops is this: never mind whom you praise, but
be very careful whom you blame. Most critical reputations have struck
on the reef of some poet or novelist whom the great censor, in his
proud old age, has thought he might disdain with impunity. Who
recollects the admirable treatises of John Dennis, acute, learned,
sympathetic? To us he is merely the sore old bear, who was too stupid
to perceive the genius of Pope. The grace and discrimination lavished
by Francis Jeffrey over a thousand pages, weigh like a feather beside
one sentence about Wordsworth's _Excursion_, and one tasteless sneer
at Charles Lamb. Even the mighty figure of Sainte-Beuve totters at the
whisper of the name Balzac. Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiser
to have taken counsel with himself before he laughed at Shelley. And
the very unimportant but sincere and interesting writer, whose book
occupies us to-day, is in some respects the crowning instance of the
rule. His literary existence has been sacrificed by a single outburst
of petulant criticism, which was not even literary, but purely
political.

The only passage of Winstanley's _Lives of the English Poets_ which
is ever quoted is the paragraph which refers to Milton, who, when it
appeared, had been dead thirteen years. It runs thus:

"_John Milton_