When Edward Young compares his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) to a garden, he is also doing a number of other things. He is implying that you will get pleasure, rather than only information about it, from his writing. He is suggesting that you will want to wander, rather than march, through his book. And he is reaffirming the flexibility of the kind of writing he is undertaking. Its unity is not like that of the idea of a poem in one of the neo-classical categories, given by prescribed manner or matter; nor is it like that of a philosophical treatise, given by a deductive or inductive logic. It is, instead, like that of a garden, a series of walks, prospects and emblems, in which the designer hopes to make his caprice gratifying, and occasionally instructive, to visitors.

What is criticism, in this period? Only at certain times and in certain places has ‘criticism’, as it now does, primarily designated literary criticism. Between 1740 and 1830 the term’s meanings are complex, for a number of reasons. Not only did literature only by the end of this period come to refer chiefly to works of invention, rather than to a much wider range of the products of the world of letters; but criticism bore a number of more specific senses, all of which in various ways and to various extents interacted with and informed the criticism of invented texts.