Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/39

 for the same purpose by the venerable monitor at whose feet we have already sat attentive and shrunk rebuked. In Byron the mighty past and in Tennyson the petty present is incarnate; other giants of less prominence are ranked behind the former, other pigmies of less proportion are gathered about the latter; but throughout it is assumed that no fairer example than either could be found of the best that his age had to show. We may admit for a moment the assumption that Byron was as indisputably at the head of his own generation, as indisputably its fittest and fullest representative, as we all allow Mr. Tennyson to be of his; and this assumption we may admit, because Mr. Austin is so good and complete a type of one class of the great critical kind, that by such a concession we may enable ourselves to get a clear view and a firm grasp of some definable principles of criticism; and thus to examine as we proposed the arguments on which these are based, and which we approach with no prepense design or premeditated aim to corroborate or to confute them, but simply to investigate. With a writer less clear and less forcible in purpose and in style we might not hope to get sight or hold of any principle at all; but this one, right or wrong and wise or unwise, at least does not babble to no purpose whatever like the "blind mouths" that prattle by mere chance of impulse or of habit. First then we observe that he offers us samples of either poet's work with a great