His business was to create, and not to criticise. And, had
he set himself to do so, there is no warrant that his success would
have been great. In many ways he was still in bondage to the mediaval,
and wholly uncritical, tradition. One classic, we may almost say, was
as good to him as another. He seems to have placed Ovid on a line with
Virgil; and the company in his House of Fame is undeniably mixed. His
judgments have the healthy instinct of the consummate artist. They do
not show, as those of his master, Petrarch, unquestionably do, the
discrimination and the tact of the born critic.
For this, or for any approach to it, English literature had to wait
for yet two centuries more. In the strict sense, criticism did not
begin till the age of Elizabeth; and, like much else in our literature,
it was largely due to the passion for classical study, so strongly
marked in the poets and dramatists of Shakespeare's youth, and
inaugurated by Surrey and others in the previous generation. These
conditions are in themselves significant. They serve to explain much
both of the strength and the weakness of criticism, as it has grown
up on English soil.
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