1845-1870 very high: he would indeed put it, in its own compartment,
almost on a level with the drama of 1585-1625 or the poems of 1798-1825.
Just at the present moment there may be a pretty general tendency to
consider this allowance exaggerated if not preposterous: and to set it
down to the well-known foible of age for the period of its own youth.
There is no need to do more than suggest that those who were young when
Shakespeare, or when Byron, died, would not have been exactly in their
dotage if, forty years later, they had extolled the literature of their
nonage. One does not care to dwell long on such a point: but it may just
be observed that the present writer's withers are hardly even pinched,
let alone wrung, by the strictest application, to his case, of this
rather idle notion. For some of what he is praising as the best novels
were written before he was born; many while he was in the nursery; most
before he had left school, and practically all before he had ceased to
be an undergraduate. Now acute observers know that what may be called
the disease of contemporary partisanship rarely even begins till the
undergraduate period, and is at its severest from twenty-five to
thirty-five. I would undertake that most of our reviewers who discover
Shakespeares and Sainte-Beuves, improved Thackerays and bettered
Molières, week by week or day by day, count their years between these
limits. _Beati illi_ from some points of view, but from others, if they
go on longer, Heaven help them indeed!

But all this is really idle. A critic is not right or wrong because he
is young or old as the case may be; because he follows the taste of his
age or runs counter to it; because he likes the past or because he likes
the present. He is right or wrong according as he does or does not like
the right things in the right way. And it is a simple historical fact,
capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and subjected to the
proper historical tests, that, in the large sense, the two generations