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But for Burke's treatise,
a wide gap would have been left both in the philosophy and the criticism
of the eighteenth century; and it is to be wished that later times had
done more to work the vein which he so skilfully explored. As it is,
the writers both of France and Germany--above all, Hegel in his
_Aesthetik_--have laboured with incomparably more effect than his own
countrymen, Mr. Ruskin excepted, upon the foundations that he laid.
IV. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ was the last word of the school
which the Restoration had enthroned; the final verdict of the supreme
court which gave the law to English letters from the accession of Anne
to the French Revolution. Save in the splenetic outbursts of Byron--and
they are not to be taken too seriously--the indispensable laws of
Aristotelian criticism fell silent at Johnson's death. A time of anarchy
followed; anarchy _plus_ the policeman's truncheon of the _Edinburgh_
and the _Quarterly_. [Footnote: The first number of the _Edinburgh_
appeared in 1802; the _Quarterly_ was started in a counterblast in
1809.


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