There was a time when it was impossible to make a remark on a subject of literature without thinking or being reminded of Mr Andrew Lang. That time is past, and I cannot say I regret it. It is not well to have a dictator of letters, and this one did not (I think) use his power advisedly. A graceful and at times a somewhat invertebrate writer, I think he took less pains than it was possible to take in the ordering of his prejudices by the rules of justice. This would not have mattered in an irresponsible critic, but if such things matter at all, and perhaps they don't, in a critic of wide influence, direct and indirect, it mattered a good deal. The prejudices were not unamiable in themselves, being mainly those of ‘the gentlemanly interest,’ but they were hardly presented in a manner conforming.

George Street's assessment of Lang was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1898 and, despite the obitural tone of the writer, Lang lived for another fourteen years and continued writing on the subject of literature. In fact, the work that appeared just a few days before his death was his History of English Literature: From ‘Beowulf’ to Swinburne (1912). The description of Lang's influence is not exaggerated and nor is Street's frustration unique; many contemporary and later writers commented on what they saw as Lang's lack of a serious engagement with literary criticism or a critical engagement with serious literature. Part of this irritation is directed perhaps less at Lang than at the state of literature, criticism, education and reviewing at the end of the nineteenth century. In both nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators there is frequently a sense that someone should have taken up the mantle of Matthew Arnold and forged a manifesto for such work and, for some, the frustrated hope that this might have been Lang.