most famous of these is the _Athenaeum_, which still
flourishes after a life of nearly seventy years, while between forty and
fifty years later the _Academy_ was founded on the same general
principles. But the _Athenaeum_ has always cleaved, as far as its main
articles went, to the unsigned system, while the _Academy_ started at a
period which leant the other way. Of late years, too, criticism proper,
that is to say, of letters and art, has played a larger and larger part
in daily newspapers, some of which attempt a complete review of books as
they appear, while others give reviews of selected works as full as
those of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of example is necessary
to be attributed in this case, the credit is perhaps mainly due to the
original _Pall Mall Gazette_, an evening newspaper started in 1864 with
one of the most brilliant staffs ever known, including many of the
original _Saturday_ writers and others.

The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so many forms
has been that almost the whole of the critical work of the latter part
of the century has passed through periodicals--that, except as regards
Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to editing, every one who will
shortly be mentioned in this chapter has either won his spurs or
exercised them in this kind, and that of the others, mentioned in other
chapters and in connection with other subjects, a very small proportion
can be said to have been entirely disdainful of periodical publication.
At the very middle of the century, and later, the older Quarterlies were
supported by men like John Wilson Croker, a survival of their first
generation Nassau W. Senior, and Abraham Hayward, the last a famous
talker and "diner-out." Other chief critics and essayists, besides
Kingsley and Froude, were George Brimley, Librarian of Trinity College,
Cambridge; Henry Lancaster, a Balliol man and a Scotch barrister; and
Walter Bagehot, a banker, and not a member of either University.
Brimley has left us what is perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in
the time between the days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the
usual critic, and those when he was accepted as a matter of course or
cavilled at as a matter of paradox; and Lancaster occupies pretty much
the same position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to single
out any particular and distinguishing critical effort of Bagehot's, who
wrote on all subjects, from Lombard Street to Tenny