Preface.--Introduction.--The perfect critic.--Imperfect critics: Swinburne as critic. A romantic aristocrat [George Wyndham] The local flavour. A note on the American critic. The French intelligence.--Tradition and the individual talent.--The possibility of a poetic drama.--Euripides and Professor Murray.--"Rhetoric" and poetic drama.--Notes on the blank verse of Christopher Marlowe.--Hamlet and his problems.--Ben Jonson.--Philip Massinger.--Swinburne as poet.--Blake.--Dante.