BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library PN 86.S15 3 1924 026 927 933 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026927933 A HISTOEY OF CKITICISM AND LITERARY TASTE Ignorantium temeraria pUnimque sunt judida. — POLYCAEP LeTSBR. A HISTOEY OP CEITICISM AND LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE FROM THfi EARLIEST TEXTS TO THE PRESENT DAY GEOKGE SAINTSBURY M.A. OxoN. ; Hon. LL.D. Aberd. PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINEUROH IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. I. CLASSICAL AND MEDIAEVAL CEITICISM NEW YORK DODD, MEAD, AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 1900 K H All Rights reserved N M 4- S ^ oo Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, Scotland. PREFACE. It is perhaps vain to attempt to tone down the audacity of the present essay by any explanations or limitations ; it is certain that those who are offended by it at first blush are very un- likely to be propitiated by excuses of the faults which, excus- ably or inexcusably, it no doubt contains. The genesis of it is as follows. "When, not much less than thirty years ago, the writer was first asked to undertake the duty of a critic, he had naturally to overhaul his own acquaintance with the theory and practice of criticism, and to inquire what was the acquaintance of others therewith. The disconcerting smallness of the first was a little compensated by the discovery that very few persons seemed to be much better furnished. Dr Johnson's projected " History of Criticism, as it relates to Judging of Authours " no doubt has had fellows in the great library of books unwritten. But there were then, and I believe there are still, only two actual attempts to deal with the whole subject. One of these ^ t have never seen, and indeed had ' Delia Critioa, Libri Tre. B. Maz- of Literary Criticism, Boston, U.S.A., zarella, Genova, 1866. The book to .1899, is invaluable as a bibliography, which I owe my knowledge of this, and has much more than merely bibUo- Professors Gayley and Scott's Intro- graphical interest. duction to the Methods and Materials VI PREFACE. never heard of till nearly the whole of the present volume was written. Moreover, it seems to be merely a torso. The other, Th^ry's Histoire des Opinions LitUraires} a book which, after two editions at some interval, has been long out of print, is a work of great liveliness, no small knowledge, and, in its airy French kind, a good deal of acuteness. But the way in which " Critique Arabe," " Critique Juive," &c,, are knocked off in a page or a paragraph at one end, and the way in which, at the other — though the second edition was published when Mr Arnold was just going to write, and the first when Cole- ridge, and Hazlitt, and Lamb had already written — the historian knows of nothing English later than Campbell and Blair, are things a little disquieting. At any rate, neither of these was then known to 'me, and I had, year by year, to pick up for myself, and piece together, the greater and lesser classics of the subject in a haphazard and groping fashion. This volume — which will, fortune permitting, be followed by a second dealing with the matter from the Eenaissance to the death of eighteenth - century Classicism, and by a third on Modern Criticism — is an attempt to supply for others, on the basis of these years of reading, the Atlas of which the writer himself so sorely felt the need. He may have put elephants for towns, he may have neglected important rivers and moun- tains, like a general from the point of view of a newspaper correspondent, or a newspaper correspondent from the point of view of a general ; but he has done what he could. The book, the plan of which was accepted by my publishers some five or six years ago, before I was appointed to the Chair which I have the honour to hold, has been delayed in its com- ' Ed. 2, Paris, 1849. The first edi- would strengthen my point in the text ; tion may have Appeared between 1830 but this does not seem to agree with and 1840. Vapereau says 1844, which the Preface of the second. PREFACE, Vll position, partly by work previously undertaken, partly by pro- fessional duties. But it has probably not been injured by the necessity of reading, for these duties, some four or five times over again, the Poetics and the Rhetoric, the Institutes and the HepL "Ty]rov