but for perception," we are lost in the mazes of indecision. Thus Mr. Ruskin demonstrates most beautifully the great superiority of Sir Walter Scott's heroines over his heroes, and by the time we settle our minds to this conviction we find that Mr. Bagehot, that most acute and exhausting of critics, thinks the heroines inferior in every way, and that Sir Walter was truly felicitous only in his male characters.
Happily, this is a point on which we should be able to decide for ourselves without much prompting; but all disputed topics are not equally intelligible. There is the vexed and vexing question of romantic and classical, conservative and liberal poetry, about which Mr. Courthope and Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. Myers have had so much to say of late, and which is, at best, but a dimly lighted path for the uninitiated to travel. There is that perpetual problem, Mr. Walt Whitman, the despair and the stumbling-block of critics, to whose extraordinary effusions, as the Quarterly Review neatly puts it, "existing standards cannot be applied with exactness." There is Emily Brontë, whose verses we were permitted for years to ignore, and in whom we are now
