es of composition, not in the least how it affects the principles of
taste. We know everything about the work, and nothing of it. The critic
takes good care not to baulk the reader's fancy by anticipating the
effect which the author has aimed at producing. To be sure, the works
so handled were often worthy of their commentators; they had the form
of imagination without the life or power; and when any one had gone
regularly through the number of acts into which they were divided, the
measure in which they were written, or the story on which they were
founded, there was little else to be said about them. It is curious
to observe the effect which the _Paradise Lost_ had on this class of
critics, like throwing a tub to a whale: they could make nothing of it.
'It was out of all plumb--not one of the angles at the four corners was
a right angle!' They did not seek for, nor would they much relish,
the marrow of poetry it contained. Like polemics in religion, they had
discarded the essentials of fine writing for the outward form and points
of controversy. They were at issue with Genius and Nature by what route
and in what garb they should enter the Temple of the Muses. Accordingly
we find that Dryden had no other way of satisfying himself of the
pretensions of Milton in the epic style but by translating his anomalous
work into rhyme and dramatic dialogue.(3) So there are connoisseurs
who give you the subject, the grouping, the perspective, and all the
mechanical circumstances of a picture; but they never say a word about
the expression. The reason is, they see the former, but not the latte
taking an inventory of works of art (they want a faculty for higher
studies), as there are works of art, so called, which seemed to have
been composed expressly with an eye to such a class of connoisseurs. In
them are to be found no recondite nameless beauties thrown away upon
the stupid vulgar gaze; no 'graces snatched beyond the reach of art';
nothing but what the merest pretender may note down in good set terms
in his common-place book, just as it is before him. Place one of these
half-informed, imperfectly organised spectators before a tall canvas
with groups on groups of figures, of the size of life, and engaged in a
complicated action, of which they know the name and all the particulars,
and there are no bounds to their burst of involuntary enthusiasm. They
mount on the stilts of the subject and ascend the highest Heaven of
Invention, fro