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Criticism is as old as literary art and we can set the stage for our study of three moderns if we see how certain critics in the past have dealt with the ethical aspects of literature.

I have chosen five contrasting pairs, ten men in all, and they are arranged in roughly chronological order.

Such a list must naturally be selective, and the treatment of each man is brief, for I am interested only in their general ideas on the moral measure of literature.

Altogether, the list will give us considerable variety in attitudes and some typical ones, for these critics range all the way from censors to those who consider art above ethics, all the way from Plato to Poe.

And most of the great periods are represented, because we will compare Plato and Aristotle from the golden age of Greece ; ;

Stephen Gosson and Sir Philip Sidney from renaissance England ; ;

Dr. Johnson and William Hazlitt of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England ; ;

and James Russell Lowell and Edgar Allan Poe of nineteenth century American letters.