Note 1 — THE PRESENT FUNCTIONS OF CRITICISM

One illustration of the indifference of the authorities of our University Presses to the interest of Literature is so scandalous that it must be specified. Fourteen years ago a series of lectures was delivered by the then Clarke Lecturer in the Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge. They were afterwards published under the title of From Shakespeare to Pope, and reviewed in the Quarterly Review for October, 1886. The lectures, as the Review showed, absolutely swarmed with blunders, many of them so gross as to be almost incredible. Ever since then the volume has been circulated by the Press, absolutely unrevised, indeed without a single correction, and is now in circulation.