chapter i. of the last Book of the last volume generally, a most

valuable companion has been supplied since my text was written by Mr D. Nichol Smith’s excellent edition of _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_. (Glasgow, 1903.)

Footnote 119:

The full title is _Observations on the Faërie Queene of Spenser_ ed. 1 (London, 1754); ed. 2, 1762 (of which is my copy). From Hughes’s editions of 1715 to Upton’s of 1758 (_after_ Warton’s first edition) a good deal of attention had been paid to Spenser, if not quite according to knowledge. For a long list of imitations in the eighteenth century see Mr H. A. Beers (_English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_, London, 1899, pp. 854-55, note), who copies it from Prof. Phelps.

Footnote 120:

i. 15, ed. cit.

Footnote 121:

Ed. cit., i. 96.

Footnote 122:

Originally issued in the years 1774-78-81. The editions of 1824 and 1840, with additional notes by Price and others, are valuable for matter; and that of Mr W. C. Hazlitt (4 vols., London, 1871), with the assistance of Drs Furnival, Morris, Skeat, and others, _in_valuable. But Warton’s own part is necessarily more and more obscured in them.

Footnote 123:

_De quo fabula?_

Footnote 124:

See Appendix I.

Footnote 125:

He is, however, exquisitely characteristic in his description of Addison’s own critical work (see the Bohn ed., ii. 383) as “discovering his own good taste, and calculated to improve that of the reader, but otherwise of no great merit.”

Footnote 126:

_e.g._ iii. 171: “_Men’s minds._ Men’s, for the genitive plural of _man_, is not allowable.”

Footnote 127:

_Vide_ ed. cit., ii. 417, and especially iii. 389-91, a long note of very great interest. I do not know whether Hurd had condescended to take a hint from the humble dissenting Mason (_v. inf._)

Footnote 128:

He was born only twenty years after the death of Dryden, and died the year before Tennyson was born.

Footnote 129:

My copy in 10 vols. (London, 1777) appears to be made up of different editions of the separate books—the fifth of the _Horace_ and _Dialogues_, the third of the _Cowley_.

Footnote 130:

These qualities are particularly shown in a really admirable note, ii. 107-15, on the method and art of criticism, with special reference to Longinus, Bouhours, and Addison. Hurd is, however, once more, and in more detail, too severe on Addison. It may be repeated that Lessing pays very particular attention to Hurd in the _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_, and speaks of him with great respect.

Footnote 131:

ii. 153.

Footnote 132:

ii. 154.

Footnote 133:

ii. 220.

Footnote 134:

Almost too liberal, as where he falls foul of Jeremias Holstenius for saying the plain truth that “but for the _Argonautics_, there had been no fourth book of the _Æneis_” (iii. 49).

Footnote 135:

iii. 153.

Footnote 136:

P. 464.

Footnote 137:

Boswell, Globe ed., pp. 363, 441.

Footnote 138:

Ibid., p. 598.

Footnote 139:

_Works_, ed. cit., vol. vi., p. 196.

Footnote 140:

In _Letter VIII._, ibid., p. 266 _sq._

Footnote 141:

P. 271.

Footnote 142:

P. 273.

Footnote 143:

P. 290.

Footnote 144:

P. 299.

Footnote 145:

P. 306.

Footnote 146:

P. 309.

Footnote 147:

P. 313.

Footnote 148:

Hurd knew Gray (who, characteristically in both ways, described him as “the last man who wore stiff-topped gloves”) pretty well (see the references in Mr Gosse’s Index). He may have caught some heat from one who had plenty, though he concealed it.

Footnote 149:

“Skroddles” was _William_.

Footnote 150:

My copy contains all three bound together. It is interesting, though not surprising, to find that there was no demand for the two original and valuable constituents, and a brisk one for the commonplace third.

Footnote 151:

_Power of Numbers_, p. 9.

Footnote 152:

Ibid., p. 27.

Footnote 153:

_Prosaic Numbers_, passim.

Footnote 154:

Mason’s very errors are interesting, as where his delight in recovered _rhythm_—in full melody of variety—leads him to something like the old blasphemy of _rhyme_ (“one of the lowest ornaments and greatest shackles of modern poesy” _Power of Numbers_, p. 14).

Footnote 155:

Even at this early date Mason was able to quote not a few writers— Pemberton, Manwaring, Malcolm, Gay, who, as well as Geddes, Foster, Galley, and others, had dealt with this subject. In fact, the list of such authors in the eighteenth century is quite long, though few of them are very important. For an excellent reasoned bibliography see Mr T. S. Omond’s _English Metrists_ (Tunbridge Wells, 1903). Henry Pemberton, Gresham Professor of Physic, and a man of various ability, published on the to us surprising subject of Glover’s _Leonidas_, in 1738, _Observations on Poetry_, which I had hunted in the catalogues for a long time, when Mr Gregory Smith kindly gave me a copy. It shows, as the election of its text may indicate, and as its date would further suggest, no very enthusiastic or imaginative appreciation of the Muse, but is remarkably learned, not merely in the ancients and the modern Frenchmen, but in Italians like Minturno and Castelvetro. Pemberton deals with Epic and Dramatic poetry—their rise, dignity, fable, sentiment, character, language, and difference; with Versification, where his standpoint may be guessed, from his denouncing “the mixture of iambic and trochaic” as a blemish on _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_; with the Sublime. He is not an inspiring or inspired writer, but holds some position, both as influential on the Germans, who not seldom quote him, and in the history of Prosody.

Footnote 156:

Not Cowper’s hero, but a son of “Picturesque” Gilpin. Mitford had been a pupil of Gilpin the elder.

Footnote 157:

Foster’s (John) _Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity_ (second edition, Eton, 1763) is duly before me also, but I must not touch it here.

Footnote 158:

As _An Essay on the Harmony of Language_. My friend, Mr T. S. Omond, in the quite invaluable bibliography referred to above, thinks this “clearer, shorter, more pointed” than the second. It is at any rate well to remember that when it appeared, Johnson had ten years to live, and Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were in their nurseries.

Footnote 159:

_Harmony of Language_, second edition, p. 51.

Footnote 160:

Ibid., p. 81.

Footnote 161:

20 vols., ed. Assézat and Tourneux: Paris, 1875-76. I had known Diderot before, not merely from Carlyle and Mr Morley, but from Génin’s extraordinarily well-chosen _Pensées Choisies_ in the Didot collection. But I remember very well, after more than a quarter of a century, the delight with which I read this edition as the successive volumes reached me at their appearance. I cannot take them down without that anticipation of sentences at particular places of the page which one only feels in such a case. They are quarrelling with the edition now, of course: but that does not matter.

Footnote 162:

Cf. p. 160, vol. vi. ed. cit. “_Vous avez péché contre les règles d’Aristote, d’Horace, de Vida, et de Le Bossu._” Even if (as so much else in the book is) this was partly suggested by Sterne, it is none the less a genuine fling of Diderot’s own irony and recalcitrance. And an indignant note of the earlier edition of Brière, shocked in 1821 at the substitution of Le Bossu (then much forgotten) for Boileau, who was, though on the eve of dethronement, in full dictatorship, is a valuable document for us, and for this chapter.

Footnote 163:

_Œuvres_, ed. cit., v. 211-227.

Footnote 164:

The _éloge_ dates from 1761: exactly the middle point between the earliest of Hurd’s _Dissertations_ in 1757 and his Letters in 1765 (_v. sup._).

Footnote 165:

Ibid., 228-239.

Footnote 166:

_V. sup._, ii. p. 303.

Footnote 167:

_Œuvres_, vi. 366, 367.

Footnote 168:

Let us remember that this evil-famed book itself contains admirable critical passages, notably (chap. xxxviii), that attack on the French theatre which Lessing extracted in Nos. 84, 85 of the _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_.

Footnote 169:

_Œuvres_, iii. 200-407.

Footnote 170:

Fortunately the contents and indices of the Assézat-Tourneux edition are admirably abundant and clear: a merit not so common in French books as some others.

Footnote 171:

_Œuvres_, viii. 339-426. The English reader has at his disposal the excellent translation of Mr W. H. Pollock (London, 1883), with a preface by Sir Henry Irving. I should like also to mention here Mrs L. Tollemache’s _Diderot’s Thoughts on Art and Style_, an interesting selection which has, I think, been more than once published.

Footnote 172:

_Œuvres_, vii. 299-410 (with appendices).

Footnote 173:

_Œuvres_, xi. 368-373.

Footnote 174:

The chief exceptions, such as a letter to Panckoucke (May 25, 1764) and a sensible one to Chamfort (Oct. 6, same year) have a very little. The words _Vous admirez Richardson_ to the elder Mirabeau (April 8, 1767) may raise expectations: they will be cruelly dashed. _Cf._ the indignant renunciation of the description _homme de lettres_ a little later (May 13), and the long and important review of his own career to Saint-Germain, dated “1770-26/2.” The fact is, that a maniac of egotism and self-torment cannot be a critic, the subject under consideration being inevitably turned out of court by Self.

Footnote 175:

One book of some traditional note and interest from the eminence of its author in other ways, Condillac’s _Art d'Écrire_ (which forms part of his elaborate _Cours d’Étude_ for the Prince of Parma: Parma, 1769-1773), was not there noticed. It is of little intrinsic importance, being a mere treatise on “Composition”—a common-sense and common-place _Rhetoric_ adjusted to late French eighteenth century standards. Its definition of style as depending on “netteté _et_ caractère,” is an obvious attempt to combine the elder with the Buffonian ideal.

Footnote 176:

My copy is the Didot edition of the _Œuvres_, in three large vols. (Paris, 1873). As, however, this is very cumbrous to hold, I also use and here cite the smaller separate edition (same publishers: Paris, 1876) of the _De l’Allemagne_.

Footnote 177:

Even after publishing the two previous volumes, I find myself accused of “_not having taken the trouble to acquaint myself with_ the fact that the application of psychological tests has profoundly altered criticism,” or words to that effect. εἴθ’ ὤφελ’ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι. I only wish I had _not_ had to thread these more dismal and dangerous Symplegades! But I am at any rate trying to save others from their danger.

Footnote 178:

In the _Nouvelle Héloise_. The omission (perhaps due to a juvenile unwillingness to acknowledge her idol indebted to anybody) is the more striking because we know, and could have been sure if we did not know, that she was early acquainted with, and enthralled by, the English master.

Footnote 179:

I. 216 of the larger ed. cited.

Footnote 180:

220 of the larger ed. cited.

Footnote 181:

Ibid., pp. 252, 253.

Footnote 182:

Ibid., p. 257.

Footnote 183:

Ibid., p. 263.

Footnote 184:

Ibid., p. 265.

Footnote 185:

Goethe and Schiller might laugh at her; but there is no doubt that they were secretly flattered at her interest in the things of Germany.

Footnote 186:

The Duke of Rovigo’s blunt information in his letter of expulsion, that “the book is not French” (see the _Preface_, or any account of Mme. de Staël), summarises his master’s terror very well.

Footnote 187:

P. 176 of the smaller edition cited; i. 80, of the larger.

Footnote 188:

“De l’art dramatique.”

Footnote 189:

Chap. xxvi. _L’idéal du caractère tragique consiste dans le triomphe que la volonté remporte sur le destin et sur nos passions; le comique exprime au contraire l’empire de l’instincts physique sur l’existence morale._ From which it will follow that _Hamlet_ and _Lear_ are not tragedies, and that _As You Like It_ and _Much Ado About Nothing_ are not comedies.

Footnote 190:

P. 340, chap. ii. 148.

Footnote 191:

Of course not in the worst English connotation, but only in that of “commonplace,” “ordinary,” “undistinguished.”

Footnote 192:

M. Des Essarts in the Petit de Julleville _History_.

Footnote 193:

For _René_ is only an episode of the _Génie_ itself; and _Les Martyrs_ a prose-poem in illustration of its theories.

Footnote 194:

See vol. i. p. 425.

Footnote 195:

Chateaubriand’s _Mélanges Littéraires_ contain in their later numbers some interesting reviews, especially that of February 1819 on the _Annales Littéraires_, which supplied almost the _Défense et Illustration_ of the Romantic outburst. But I do not know that the early pieces on English literature dating from the last year of the eighteenth century, are not as important. In these the writer, either from policy (for though he had a friendly editor in Fontanes, he was writing under the eyes of Bonaparte’s police) or really imperfect conversion, approximates much more to the “dunghill-and-pearl” view of Shakspere than the innocent might think likely, and has not quite reached his future state (_v. inf._) of illumination as to _Ossian_. He is very severe on Young, and has a very curious passage on the English view of the subject at the moment, which is probably not far from the truth, and at any rate helps us to understand the half-way-house attitude of men like Jeffrey and Campbell. The Queen Anne men, we are told, were at a discount—Richardson was little read, Hume and Gibbon were thought gallicisers, and so forth. But these things are at best useful sidelights on their author’s position in the _Génie_.

Footnote 196:

I use the 2-vol. ed. of the _Collection Didot_.

Footnote 197:

Six “books” of _dogma_, twelve of _recherches littéraires_, six of _culte_, is the author’s own summary of his scheme (_Génie_, II. i. 1).

Footnote 198:

Ed. cit., ii. 306-326.

Footnote 199:

II. i. 5.

Footnote 200:

II. ii. 5-8.

Footnote 201:

II. ii. 10.

Footnote 202:

Vol. I. p. 235.

Footnote 203:

II. iii. 2, 3.

Footnote 204:

Vol. I. p. 257.

Footnote 205:

II. iii. 7.

Footnote 206:

II. iv.

Footnote 207:

Ibid., chap. iii.

Footnote 208:

Chap. viii. It is a pity that Chateaubriand did not live long enough to read Mr Ruskin (who had begun to write before his death) on “The Angel of the Sea”—one of the great conceptions whose poetic suggestiveness he has himself here indicated.

Footnote 209:

This fills the whole of the Fifth or last Book of the Second Part, and shows the author at nearly his best.

Footnote 210:

_Il y règne_ (_in_ Saint Louis) _une sombre imagination très propre à la peinture de cette Egypte, pleine de souvenirs et de tombeaux, et qui vit passer tour à tour les Pharaons, les Ptolemées, les solitaires de la Thebaide, et les soudans des barbares_.

Footnote 211:

I have not thought it necessary to notice Chateaubriand’s literary judgments in the _Essai sur les Révolutions_ at the beginning, or in the _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_ at the end of his career. The first, interesting as it is, is too crude (_v. inf._, Bk. viii. Ch. ii.), the second too much spoilt by “cooking of spleen,” and both too personal and egotistic.

Footnote 212:

Chateaubriand, Joubert’s intimate friend, printed some of this privately after the author’s death; and in 1842 Joubert’s nephew published two vols. of _Pensées_, Letters, &c. These, with some subsequent augmentations, had reached their 10th ed. in 1901. There is an English translation of part by Mr Attwood, and perhaps others.

Footnote 213:

Sainte-Beuve, Sylvestre de Sacy, Saint-Marc-Girardin, Géruzez, and Poitou—the last a scholarly lawyer and man of letters, who contributed to the _Deux Mondes_, wrote books of various kinds, and died in 1880.

Footnote 214:

At p. 203 of the usual ed., extending to the end, and filling nearly half the book.

Footnote 215:

P. 265 ed. cit.

Footnote 216:

P. 273-300.

Footnote 217:

P. 387.

Footnote 218:

xxiii. viii., pp. 303, 304.

Footnote 219:

Ibid., xvi., p. 305.

Footnote 220:

P. 376. But as there is in the book a sufficient index, I need not perhaps multiply note-indications.

Footnote 221:

The numerous articles on the individual persons named and to be named— most of which will be found indicated in the general index-volume to the _Causeries du Lundi_, &c.—are importantly supplemented by a more general dealing in _Chateaubriand et Son Groupe Littéraire_ (_v. inf._, Bk. viii. Ch. ii.). This is a “standing order” of reference to the end of the chapter.

Footnote 222:

Especially the brilliant paper in _C. du L._, i. 371-391, on _M. de Feletz et la Crit. Litt. sous l’Empire_, February 25, 1850.

Footnote 223:

2 vols., Paris, 1839.

Footnote 224:

_v._ Victor upon William.

Footnote 225:

His chief work available in book-form is his _Cours de Littérature Dramatique_, 6 vols., Paris, 1825.

Footnote 226:

This makes the almost inevitable coupling of him with his contemporary and (_mutatis mutandis_) namesake, Jeffrey, a little unfair. He was a genuine critical highwayman, who fired at the coach wherever he found it: Jeffrey only peppered passengers who went the stages after he had himself got down.

Footnote 227:

_Annales Littéraires_, 5 vols., Paris, 1818-1824.

Footnote 228:

I have seen things of his; but have somehow missed his _Œuvres_, 10 vols., Paris, 1828.

Footnote 229:

Andrieux deserves a note, perhaps, as having occupied a place of strength—the chair of French Literature in the Collége de France— during the critical time 1814-1833, and as having defended the Capitol valiantly against the invaders. But his valiancy was greater than his _vaillance_; and instead of criticising him it is nobler to salute him, with M. de Jouy and some others, as respectably mistaken.

Footnote 230:

9 vols., Paris, 1811-1824. Ginguené died in 1816, and the book, published in part posthumously from his MSS., was completed by another hand.

Footnote 231:

It may be found subjoined to the _Pantheon Littéraire_ edition of La Harpe vol. iii., Paris, 1840. In his _Œuvres_, 5 vols. (Paris, 1826), and _Œuvres Posthumes_, 3 vols. (Paris, 1828-30), there is not much else of importance.

Footnote 232:

Chap. iii., _op. cit._

Footnote 233:

Chap. vi.

Footnote 234:

4 vols., Paris, 1817. The lectures had been delivered in 1811-14. I have had to rely on my reading of the British Museum copy, the only one which I have ever seen in a catalogue, though rather high-priced, having been sold before I could get it, and my advertisements for another (it is a book worth having) not being successful. Some accounts (_e.g._, that of Vapereau) are quite unfair to it.

Footnote 235:

_Mélanges_, 6 vols., Paris, 1828-1830.

Footnote 236:

I must find room, if only in a note, for the unfortunate Auger, who succeeded Suard as universal provider of _éloges_ and Introductions in the classic sense, who served as victim to one of Daudet’s most ignoble transcripts of reality in _L’Immortel_, and whose _ton sec et rogue_ Sainte-Beuve has somewhere despatched and impaled for ever in one of his really immortal phrases.

Footnote 237:

Some will no doubt expect that a third, Guizot, should be joined to them. He did much reviewing in his youth (as did his first wife, Pauline de Meulan), and his much later companion volumes on Corneille and Shakespeare are more than respectable. But he was perhaps even less of a critic “in his heart” than Cousin.

Footnote 238:

Besides his better known works, such as those on Plato and Descartes, and on the _grandes dames_ of the seventeenth century, which touch the subject on different sides, his _Fragments Littéraires_ (Paris, 1843) may be consulted. I fear that his summary dismissal may surprise some and enrage others: but I cannot help it. I have nothing to do with his psychology, and he has next to nothing to do with _my_ criticism.

Footnote 239:

_Œuvres_, Paris, 1854-1858.

Footnote 240:

_C. de L._ I. 108, _sq._ on the literary work of both Cousin and Villemain.

Footnote 241:

It dates from the spring of 1823: I have used the complete posthumous edition (Paris, 1854).

Footnote 242:

For so great an ironist Beyle _did_ lack humour to a surprising degree.

Footnote 243:

P. 6, ed. cit.

Footnote 244:

P. 14 _sq._

Footnote 245:

As some have said: “When you _read_ _Twelfth Night_, you are in Elysium; when you _see_ it, you are not even in Illyria.”

Footnote 246:

P. 19.

Footnote 247:

P. 32.

Footnote 248:

Lamartine, in a letter given in the book (p. 129 _sq._), says roundly of Beyle: “Il n’y a selon lui et selon nous d’autres règles que les exemples du génie”; and though I do not remember that Beyle himself formulates this Brunonian (_v._ vol. ii. p. 95 note) trenchancy, he evidently adopts it.

Footnote 249:

P. 180 _sq._, ed. cit. _inf._ All this passage is important, especially the reference to B.'s habit of “taking the other side,” a habit common with critics, but not critical.

Footnote 250:

_C. du L._, ix. 314 _sq._

Footnote 251:

It is fair to say that the oddity is Beyle’s own. See for instance his _Lettres Inédites_, p. 235.

Footnote 252:

_Lettres Intimes de Stendhal_ (Paris, 1892).

Footnote 253:

My copy is in 2 vols. (Paris, 1879).

Footnote 254:

Himself a terrible critic in a certain sense: hardly one at all in others, and in most parts of ours.

Footnote 255:

There is no complete edition, either of Nodier’s collected work or of his criticism: and many of his books are not at all easy to obtain separately. The editor of the _Tales_, &c., in the Charpentier collection, has, however, most wisely prefixed certain capital articles to the various volumes—_Des Types en Littérature to the Romans_; _Quelques Observations sur la nouvelle école Littéraire to Les Proscrits_; _Du Fantastique en Littérature_ to the _Contes_. All these are important.

Footnote 256:

One of Crapelet’s best produced books (Paris, 1829).

Footnote 257:

The standard treatise on this is that of M. E. Krantz, _L’Esthétique de Descartes_: Paris, 1882.

Footnote 258:

_Op. cit. sup._, Introduction.

Footnote 259:

Halle, in the year named.

Footnote 260:

Frankfort-on-the-Oder, 1750-58.

Footnote 261:

Later, Baumgarten did formally, while admitting metre as a sort of adjunct of “perfection,” provide that a prose work such as _Telémaque_ may be a poem, while verse compositions may not,—the old notion back again.

Footnote 262:

Frankfort: 1750 1st vol., 1758 2nd. It was never finished.

Footnote 263:

_Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften_, 3 vols., Halle, 1748-50.

Footnote 264:

He is thought to have derived something from Arnold, _Versuch und Anleitung zur Poesie der Deutschen_ (2nd ed., 1741), a book of which I am still in search, while I should like to have rather fuller opportunities than I have yet had of studying Baumgarten himself and some others of the earlier Germans.

Footnote 265:

Leipzig, 1771-74, but mostly written much earlier. It was greatly enlarged twenty years later. Blankenberg’s _Zusätze_ came after this in 1796-98, and there are extensive _Appendices_ by others, making 8 vols. (1792-1808).

Footnote 266:

This book actually belongs to the nineteenth century, having been published at Berlin in 1803-5 (4 vols.) But Eberhard was then a man over sixty; he had published a _Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften_ twenty years earlier, and his general position is that of the third quarter of the eighteenth.

Footnote 267:

_V. sup._, ii. 513, note. First published in 1741, it was constantly reprinted. André was a Jesuit, and his full name was Yves Marc _de L’Isle_ André, whence the rigid virtue of the British Museum insists that he shall be looked for under L.

Footnote 268:

For Vico’s æsthetic, see, in addition to Professor Flint’s admirable _Vico_ (Edinburgh, 1882), the very interesting _Estetica_ of Signor Benedetto Croce (Part II. chap. v. pp. 228-243: Milan, Palermo, and Naples, 1902). This chapter, with some earlier ones, had been printed separately as a specimen the year before. I owe copies of both, with one of a still earlier series on _La Critica Letteraria_ (Rome, 1896), to Signor Croce’s kindness; and the drift of the last named, which condenses the _inesattezza_ of the term “literary criticism,” had itself prepared me for the disapproval (not unmixed) which he expresses of the first volume of this work as “deprived of method and determinate object.” But as I still see, or seem to see, my own object quite clearly defined before me, as I have found no fault in the compass which I use, and feel the helm of my method quite solid and obedient in my hand, I fear I must hold my course all the same. I shall only say that the sketch of criticism or æsthetic before Vico which precedes the chapter above referred to, shows remarkable knowledge and faculty of statement.

Footnote 269:

The _Scienza_ first appeared in 1725, but was practically transformed in its second ed., 1730. Its ideas on poetry were further developed later; but anticipations of them appear even earlier in the _De Constantia Jurisprudentis_ of 1721, if not even in the still earlier Lectures—most of them but recently published—of 1699-1708.

Footnote 270:

_Franciscus Baco in aureo de Aug. Sci. libello_, &c., vol. ii. p. 5 of Ferrari’s _Opere di G. Vico_ (6 vols., Milan, 1852). I owe the use of the copy of this, with which I have worked, to the kindness of Professor Flint.

Footnote 271:

_Omnium scientiarum artiumque commune instrumentum est nova Critica._ Ibid., p. 7.

Footnote 272:

P. 11.

Footnote 273:

Pp. 26-28.

Footnote 274:

Ed. cit., iii. 265 _sq._

Footnote 275:

P. 275, note.

Footnote 276:

Ed. cit., iv. 161-245. The earlier books are not superfluous for our purpose.

Footnote 277:

I may observe that Vico, though an extremely consistent thinker in reality, is apt to lay such stress on the particular side of his thought prominent at the moment, that it may deceive the unwary and must furnish the unscrupulous with handles. Compare, as one example of many, the attack on the notion of poets being “_natural_ Theologians,” at _De Const. Jurisp._ iii. 277, with the argument for their being “_political_ Theologians” a few pages later (pp. 295, 296), comparing also with both his later passage on “Teologia Poetica” in the second _Scienza_ (v. 155).

Footnote 278:

Ed. cit., v. 1, 151-421, 422-461.

Footnote 279:

v. 163.

Footnote 280:

P. 168. Vico had anticipated this earlier.

Footnote 281:

iv. 200. (See the _First_ draft.)

Footnote 282:

No reasonable person will object to this the praise of Italian writers in the _De Stud. Rat._, p. 125.

Footnote 283:

To do Vico full justice, we must admit that his object was less to break up Homer, as they break up Cædmon and Isaiah, than to attribute the whole work to the whole early Greek people.

Footnote 284:

On Adam Smith and Gibbon a note must suffice. The former has actually left us nothing important in print concerning the subject, though he is known to have lectured on it, and though to the partisans of “psychological” criticism the _Moral Sentiments_ may seem pertinent. His line seems to have been pretty identical with those of Hume and of Blair, who knew and used Smith’s Lectures in preparing his own. As for Gibbon, his great work did not give very much opportunity for touching our subject, and he availed himself little of what it did give: though on Byzantine literature generally, and on some individuals—Photius, Sidonius, and others—he acquits himself well enough. His early _Essay on the Study of Literature_ is extremely general and quite unimportant.

Footnote 285:

These are to be found almost _passim_ in the _Characteristics_ (my copy of which is the small 3 vol. ed., _s.l._, 1749), but chiefly in his _Advice to an Author_ (vol. i., ed. cit., p. 105-end) and in the _Third Miscellany_ (iii. 92-129).

Footnote 286:

i. 147.

Footnote 287:

iii. 187 _sq._

Footnote 288:

i. 224, &c.

Footnote 289:

iii. 173.

Footnote 290:

i. 35.

Footnote 291:

i. 147 _sq._

Footnote 292:

i. 157 _sq._

Footnote 293:

iii. 125.

Footnote 294:

i. 163 _sq._

Footnote 295:

The lively fashion in which Dr George Campbell in his _Philosophy of Rhetoric_ (_v. sup._, ii. 470) beats up his lordship’s quarters, on the score of precious and rococo style, is too much forgotten nowadays.

Footnote 296:

The literary essays occur almost wholly in the First part (published in 1742: my copy is the “new edition” of the _Essays and Treatises_, 2 vols.: London and Edinburgh, 1764).

Footnote 297:

_Essay on Delicacy of Taste_, pp. 5, 7, ed. cit.

Footnote 298:

_On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences_, ibid., p. 125.

Footnote 299:

Ibid., p. 126.

Footnote 300:

P. 141 _sq._

Footnote 301:

_V. sup._, vol. ii. pp. 327, 417.

Footnote 302:

_V. sup._, vol. ii. p. 418.

Footnote 303:

_The Sceptic_, p. 186.

Footnote 304:

Pp. 217-222.

Footnote 305:

“Refinement” seems here to mean “conceit,” “elaborate diction.” But the “simplicity” of Lucretius, in any sense in which the quality can be said to be pushed to excess by Sophocles, is very hard to grasp.

Footnote 306:

P. 257: “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance,” &c.

Footnote 307:

P. 258.

Footnote 308:

P. 274.

Footnote 309:

“I must take pleasure in the thing represented before I can take pleasure in the representation,” _v. sup._, vol. i. p. 381, _infra_ on Peacock himself.

Footnote 310:

_Essay on Tragedy_, p. 243.

Footnote 311:

I may be excused for referring to the parabasis at the beginning of the chapter, all the more that the text above was written considerably earlier than that digression.

Footnote 312:

_A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, with an Introductory Discourse concerning Taste: 1756._ I use the Bohn edition of the _Works_, vol. i. pp. 49-181.

Footnote 313:

_Op. cit._, p. 175 _sq._ But Burke does not seem to have reached the larger and deeper views of Lessing on this subject.

Footnote 314:

See vol. ii. p. 485 _sq._

Footnote 315:

Of this in turn Blair was perhaps thinking when he wrote the unlucky passage quoted in the last volume.

Footnote 316:

Part III. § iv.

Footnote 317:

Vol. ii. p. 417 _sq._

Footnote 318:

III. § xxv.

Footnote 319:

IV. § xix. i. 160, ed. cit.

Footnote 320:

In the mood in which he did that eccentric frontispiece to the Maitland Club _Sir Bevis of Hampton_ (Edinburgh, 1838) at the _abgeschmackt_-ness of which the late excellent Prof. Kölbing shuddered when he edited _Arthur and Merlin_ (Leipzig, 1890, p. ix.) A picture of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ in the Royal Academy for 1902 seems to have been actually constructed on Mr Burke’s suggestions. For a very witty and crushing jest on _The Sublime and Beautiful_, _v. inf._, Bk. viii. ch. 3.

Footnote 321:

This was not the opinion of some person who has annotated the copy of the _Essay on Taste_ (3rd ed., Edinburgh, 1780: the first appeared in 1758) which belongs to the University of Edinburgh, as “wonderfully profound.” Other annotators, however, both of this and the _Essay on Genius_ (1774)—for the University authorities of the past appear to have been somewhat indifferent to the fashion in which students used books—do not agree with him. In plain truth both pieces are rather trying examples of that “saying an infinite deal of nothing” which is so common in philosophical inquiries. “Facility in the conception of an object, if it be moderate, gives us pleasure” (_Taste_, p. 29); “The rudest rocks and mountains ... acquire beauty when skilfully imitated in painting;” “Where refinement is wanting, taste must be coarse and vulgar” (p. 115). “Perfect criticism requires therefore” (p. 174) “the greatest philosophical acuteness united with the most exquisite perfection of taste.” “The different works of men of genius sometimes differ very much in the degree of their perfection” (_Genius_, p. 236). “Both in genius for the arts and in genius for science Imagination is assisted by Memory.” Certainly “here be truths,” but a continued course of reading things like them begins before long to inspire a considerable longing for falsehoods. Gerard, however, though habitually dull, is less absurd than Alison, whom he undoubtedly supplied with his principle of Association.

Footnote 322:

Ed. cit. See a little farther on a similarly uncritical criticism on the _trahuntque siccas machinæ carinas_ of Horace.

Footnote 323:

Ibid.

Footnote 324:

The mother of Gwendolen Harleth was wiser. “Oh! my dear, any nose,” said she, “will do to be miserable with!” and if so, why not to be predatory? The only possible answer of course caps the absurdity. The conventional Bandit is an Italian; the conventional Italian has an aquiline nose: therefore, &c.

Footnote 325:

Had all æstheticians approached their subject in the spirit of our English historian of it, much of what I have said would be quite inapplicable. “The æsthetic theorist,” says Mr Bosanquet in his _Preface_ (_History of Æsthetic_: London, 1892), “desires to understand the artist, not in order to interfere with the latter, but in order to satisfy an intellectual interest of his own.” With such an attitude I have no quarrel: nor, I should think, need those who take it have any quarrel with mine. I may add that from this point onwards I shall take the liberty of a perpetual silent reference to Mr Bosanquet’s treatment of subjects and parts of subjects which seem to me to lie outside of my own plan. I purposely abstained from reading his book until two-thirds of my own were published, and more than two-thirds more of the remainder were written. And I have been amused and pleased, though not surprised, to find that if we had planned the two books together from the first, we could hardly have covered the ground more completely and with less confusion. I cannot, however, help observing that Mr Bosanquet, like almost all æstheticians I know, except Signor Croce, though he does not neglect literature, at least devotes most attention to the plastic arts. This is perhaps a little significant.

Footnote 326:

The Germans, I believe, have definitely ticketed these explorers as “The Antiquarians.”

Footnote 327:

For this see in the last vol. under Dryden, Addison, Johnson, L. Racine, Voltaire, La Harpe, &c.: in the present the Zürichers and Chateaubriand.

Footnote 328:

I may once more refer to Mr Nichol Smith’s valuable edition of the Prefaces to most of these. Mrs Montagu’s famous _Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare_ (London, 1769, and often reprinted) may expect a separate mention. It is well intentioned but rather feeble, much of it being pure _tu quoque_ to Voltaire, and sometimes extremely unjust on Corneille, and even Æschylus. It is not quite ignorant; but once more _non tali auxilio!_

Footnote 329:

See vol. ii. p. 416.

Footnote 330:

See the _Ode to the Queen_, 1706. Prior inserts a tenth line, and makes the seamless coat an awkwardly cobbled thing of quatrain, quatrain, couplet.

Footnote 331:

See vol. ii. p. 481.

Footnote 332:

To this context perhaps best belongs Thomas Hayward’s _British Muse_,[333] an anthology on the lines of Poole and Bysshe, published in 1738 and dedicated to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. [Sidenote: _T. Hayward._] The book has a preface of some length (which is said to be, like the dedication, the work not of the compiler but of Oldys[334] himself), criticising its predecessors (including Gildon) rather severely, and showing knowledge of English criticism generally; but the point of chief interest about the book is its own interest in, and extensive draughts from, Elizabethan Drama. Not merely “the divine and incomparable” Shakespeare, not merely the still popular sock and buskin of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher, but almost all the others, from Massinger and Middleton down to Goffe and Gomersall, receive attention, although, as he tells us, they were so hard to get that you had to give between three or four pounds for a volume containing some ten plays of Massinger. This is noteworthy; but that his zeal was not according to full knowledge is curiously shown by the contempt with which he speaks, not merely of Bodenham’s _Belvedere_, but of Allot’s _England’s Parnassus_, alleging “the little merit of the obsolete poets from which they were extracted.” Now it should be unnecessary to say that Allot drew, almost as largely as his early date permitted him, on “the divine and incomparable” himself, on Spenser, and on others only inferior to these. But this carping at forerunners is too common. If Oldys could write thus, what must have been the ignorance of others?

Footnote 333:

3 vols., London.

Footnote 334:

It thus connects the book with _The Muses’ Library_.

Footnote 335:

Even before, at, or about the date of the _Reliques_ themselves, a good deal was being done—_e.g._, Capell’s well-known _Prolusions_, which gave as early as 1760 the real _Nut-Browne Maid_, Sackville’s _Induction, Edward III._, and Davies’ _Nosce Teipsum_, and the _Miscellaneous Pieces_ of 1764, supplying Marston’s _Poems_ and _The Troublesome Reign of King John._

Footnote 336:

The most remarkable recent authority on this matter is of course M. Texte, who has appeared already and will appear again in his own place.

Footnote 337:

I hold (though as probable rather than certain) that Richardson and Fielding knew _Marianne_ and _Le Paysan Parvenu_: but Marivaux frankly wrote _Le Spectateur Français_.

Footnote 338:

Vol. ii. p. 545. Once more Tiraboschi must be reserved as a great early example of the historical treatment of a national literature.

Footnote 339:

I include of course the Galician and Portuguese ballad-books.

Footnote 340:

It was explained, and in manner I think not open to any but wilful misunderstanding, that among the branches of so-called, and not unjustly so-called, Criticism which were excluded from this History was the greater part of merely commentatorial “scholarship”—the editing and interpretative part of the scholarship of the Renaissance and the succeeding centuries. We were able, now and then, to admit critics of the class when, like Politian in part of his work earlier, or Bentley later, they came actually within our range. But classical scholarship has lain more and more out of our path as the eighteenth century proceeded, and it was not till far into the nineteenth, and then but for a moment, that the two converged. The greatest results of this convergence in England were given by Professors Sellar and Nettleship, the former in his admirable series of works on the Roman Poets, the latter in the essays referred to above, and by Mr Pater in his dealing with Plato and other Greeks. Professor Munro, the greatest light of the younger University, touched literature rather less than pure scholarship, and may perhaps be thought to have been least infallible when he touched the former nearest. I had fully perceived the necessity for this exclusion before the appearance of Dr Sandys' admirable _History of Classical Scholarship_; but that book, though it has not, at the time I write, reached our present period or even that of our last volume, will serve to do what I cannot do as much better than I could have done it on this count as Mr Bosanquet’s on the other.

Footnote 341:

_Les définitions ne se posent pas à priori, si ce n’est peut-être en mathématique. En histoire, c’est de l'étude patiente de la réalité qu’elles se dégagent insensiblement._ Compare Mme. de Stael, _sup._, p. 108.

Footnote 342:

It may be barely necessary to remind the reader once more that the _period_ of this accomplishment by no means synchronises in all cases. The “Dissolving of Neo-Classicism” takes in Germany scarcely more than fifty years at farthest—from 1725 to 1775 or thereabouts; in England about another quarter of a century, or till 1800 in round numbers; in France a good century—from 1730 to 1830. In Italy the solitary figure of Vico anticipates even the earliest of these dates, and originates vast alterations in what calls itself criticism; but they do not take effect for the time. The general state, both here and in Spain, is stationary.

Footnote 343:

Père André probably seemed, to himself or others, to do this.

Footnote 344:

This is where Hurd is so valuable.

Footnote 345:

It is doubtful whether Hurd would have accepted it; it is certain that Lessing would not: and Diderot never quite reached the point of view at which it presented itself.

Footnote 346:

Lessing’s attempt to confute the French _ex ore Aristotelis_ is extraordinarily effective _ad homines_, and most valuable now and then intrinsically. But it has the drawback of ignoring the fact that, though much in Shakespeare is justified by Aristotle, much can only be justified without him, and some must be justified in his teeth.

Footnote 347:

See Index to vol. i.

Footnote 348:

With, once more, the great exception and anticipation of Vico.

Footnote 349:

It is widely usual in editions of Wordsworth to print these together and consecutively. They are so short, and accessible in so many different shapes that it seems superfluous to give page-references to any particular edition. The _Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns_ (1816) (which Mr Rhys has included in the _Literary Pamphlets_ noticed elsewhere) is less purely literary, but has important passages, especially that on _Tam o’ Shanter_.

Footnote 350:

I have had to insert “almost” since this chapter was first written, as a salute to my friend Professor Raleigh. The regular Wordsworthian is, of course, not an “impartial observer” at all. And I have generally found that the best of such observers, even if they do not agree with me, are disposed to admit that W. W. said more than he meant, and even to some extent what he did _not_ mean.

Footnote 351:

That on the death of West.

Footnote 352:

I have used, and refer to, the Bohn edition of Coleridge’s Prose Works.

Footnote 353:

1800-1817.

Footnote 354:

In practice, though not always in theory: for his famous explanation of his _Christabel_ metre is admitted, even by an authority who takes such different views of prosody from mine as Mr Robert Bridges, to be quite wrong.

Footnote 355:

I have, since this was written, endeavoured to do something of the kind for a practical purpose (to which nothing is sacred) in my _Loci Critici_ (London and Boston, Mass., 1903), pp. 303-365.

Footnote 356:

Or, as he puts it in one of the great critical phrases of the world, “to produce that willing _suspension of disbelief for the moment_ which constitutes poetic faith.” It derives of course from Aristotle, but the advance on the original is immense.

Footnote 357:

“And from all other species having this object in common with it, it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” This is the dialect of “Cimmerian Lodge” with a vengeance! An attempt to expound it will be found in the abstract of the _Lectures_ of 1811 given by J. P. Collier: but it sheds little light. And simpler Estesian definitions elsewhere—“Prose is words in good order: poetry the best words in the best order,” &c.—labour likewise under the common curse that _Poetry_ escapes them. What better words in what better order than the Lord’s Prayer? Is that poetry?

Footnote 358:

The extraordinary critical genius of Coleridge can hardly be better shown than by his gloss here on the Petronian enigma, _Præcipitandus est liber spiritus_, to which we have referred so often. The poet—the image is not Coleridge’s, but I think it very fairly illustrates his view—_rides_ the reader’s own genius, and both together attain the goal.

Footnote 359:

This (chap. xvi., not long after the beginning (p. 157, ed. Bohn)) is the reference cited above, i. 419, note. It is very slight, and merely concerns Dante’s jealousy for his mother tongue.

Footnote 360:

These terms are used with no offensive intention, but in strict reference to the matter of the poems.

Footnote 361:

Chap. xx. _sub fin._, p. 201, ed. cit.

Footnote 362:

Except, once more, to my friend Mr Raleigh.

Footnote 363:

Chap. xxi. Personality, partisanship, haphazard, garbling, caricature in selection of instances, are the chief faults that Coleridge finds with both _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_. The reply is dignified in tone and not unjust; but, like other things of the same kind, it illustrates certain permanent weaknesses of human nature. All the faults, I think, which Coleridge finds with “Blue and Yellow” and “Buff” reviewing might be found with his own critique of Maturin’s _Bertram_, printed in this very volume. All these faults certainly found by every generation of authors with their critics, even when these authors happen to have been copious and constant writers of criticism themselves. Always is the author tempted, like Mr Baxter, to cry, “Ah, but _I_ was in the right, and these men are dreadfully in the wrong”; always does he think, like the Archbishop of Granada, that the incriminated part of his sermon is exactly the best part; always, when he bewails the absence of the just and impartial critics of other times, does he forget the wise ejaculation of Mr Rigmarole, “Pretty much like our own, I fancy!” (There is no mental reservation in these remarks.)

Footnote 364:

Four-and-thirty closely printed pages in the Bohn ed.

Footnote 365:

Vol. i. p. 436.

Footnote 366:

Yet there are curious lapses even here. Take the extreme example, _Alice Fell_, of whom even her author was half-ashamed as mean and homely. How about “fierce career,” and “smitten with a startling sound,” and the inversion of “Proud creature was she”?

Footnote 367:

My friend Prof. Raleigh, in his brilliant and (for that word hath something derogated) really critical study of Wordsworth (London, 1903), is of a different opinion: but I hold my own. And I do not enter into controversy on the point, because I have nothing to add to the text, written before Prof. Raleigh’s book appeared.

Footnote 368:

I am well acquainted with the glosses on this famous phrase.

Footnote 369:

“Concluding” in strictness they are not; for Coleridge, in one of his whims, chose to transfer _Satyrane’s Letters_ from _The Friend_ to be a sort of _coda_ to the _Biographia_, tipped it with the rather brutish sting of the _Critique on Bertram_, and attempted _Versöhnung_ with a mystical peroration. But the thing really and logically ends with the words “Betty Foy,” _sub fin._, chap. xxi.

Footnote 370:

He somewhere sighs for Southey’s command of terse crisp sentences, and compares his own to “Surinam toads with young ones sprouting and hanging about them as they go.”

Footnote 371:

An agreeable American critic, Miss Agnes Repplier, once remarked that Coleridge must have been “a very beatable child.” This beatability continued till his death: you can only worship him in the spirit of the Portuguese sailor towards his saints.

Footnote 372:

Mrs General Baynes of the Honourable Mrs Boldero in _The Adventures of Philip_, chap. xx.

Footnote 373:

Mr Dykes Campbell (whose threading of the maze and piecing of the ends of Coleridgiana is a standing marvel) thought, or seemed to think, that the Introduction grew into the _Biographia_ itself.

Footnote 374:

_Satyrane’s Letters_ themselves contain a good deal of criticism in and out of the interview with Klopstock (p. 270 _sq._, ed. cit.), where the credit is claimed by some for Wordsworth. The _Critique on Bertram_ opens well on the “Don Juan” story, but the rest of it is not _muy hermosa cosa_, combining, as it does, that snarling and carping tone, against which Coleridge is always and justly protesting, with more than a suspicion of personal spite. For _Bertram_ had been preferred to _Zapolya_.

Footnote 375:

The usually known reprint of the 2nd ed. of 1818 is very different from the original, published in the extraordinary fashion described by Coleridge himself in the _Biographia_, during 1809-10, and collected in volume form thereafter. This latter is perhaps the better worth reading. It is at any rate a confirmation of the at first sight immoral maxim that you should always buy a book you want, whether you can afford it or not. Twenty years ago it was not common but comparatively cheap; now, alas! it is both uncommon and very dear.

Footnote 376:

The editor of these, the late Mr Thomas Ashe (author of a poem far too little read—_The Sorrows of Hypsipyle_), took much pains with them; and if he could have kept back a few flings, would have deserved unqualified thanks. “Never mind God’s will” may be noble counsel, or an unlucky advice to run worse than your head against worse than a stone wall. But it is certainly out of place in very brief and rare notes on a classical author.

Footnote 377:

The question—a puzzle like other _Quæstiones Estesianæ_—about the exact numbers and dates of Coleridge’s Shakespearian courses is not for us. It is enough to say that our extant materials (consisting, in regard to some lectures, of notes and reports from several different sources) chiefly, if not wholly, concern two courses delivered in London (1811-12 and 1818), and one at Bristol, 1813-14. Of the Royal Institution Lectures of 1806-7, on which he relied (throwing them even farther back) to prove his priority to Schlegel, nothing at all, unluckily, is preserved. Indeed Mr Dykes Campbell insisted, and seems to have almost proved, that none at all were delivered till Jan. 1808. And of these we have only Crabb Robinson’s brief references.

Footnote 378:

This perhaps should, and can very shortly, be demonstrated:— Observation may be either broad and sweeping, or minute and concentrated; Johnson specifies the former kind in the last half of the first line. Observation may be directed to men, to things, &c.; it is to mankind that he wishes it directed, and he says so in the first half of the second. Further, as this is too abstract, he gives the poetic and imaginative touch by filling in the waste atlas, with “China” and “Peru,” with the porcelain and the pigtails, the llamas and the gold associated with mankind in these countries. And in the name of Logic, and Rhetoric and Poetry into the bargain, “What for no?”

Footnote 379:

P. 73, ed. cit. Goethe, of course, was of the same opinion.

Footnote 380:

P. 89.

Footnote 381:

P. 138.

Footnote 382:

P. 139 _sq._

Footnote 383:

_E.g._, p. 152 _sq._

Footnote 384:

P. 207.

Footnote 385:

P. 213.

Footnote 386:

P. 441.

Footnote 387:

P. 412.

Footnote 388:

_E.g._, pp. 426, 427.

Footnote 389:

All men who write for the periodical press must almost necessarily repeat themselves, and Hazlitt (whose work often comes to us directly from the press itself) is not so very much less peccant in this kind than Coleridge. Coleridge’s own method exposes the peccadillo ruthlessly. The “Let Observation” criticism occurs several times: the story about the Falls of Lanark and the man who, beginning with “majestic,” spoilt it by “very pretty,” over and over again. Nor is this repetition merely due to the chaotic state of his publications; it seems to have been a congenital bias, as testified to in his conversation quite early.

Footnote 390:

P. 15, _ed. cit._

Footnote 391:

_V. infra_ on _Letters_.

Footnote 392:

P. 38.

Footnote 393:

P. 45.

Footnote 394:

P. 74.

Footnote 395:

P. 97.

Footnote 396:

P. 158. These were, “When the professions fell off from the Church; when literature fell off from the professions; and when the press fell off from literature.”

Footnote 397:

P. 164 _sq._

Footnote 398:

P. 177.

Footnote 399:

P. 183.

Footnote 400:

P. 201.

Footnote 401:

P. 214.

Footnote 402:

P. 174, _v. inf._

Footnote 403:

Miscellanies, pp. 175-187 _ed. cit._

Footnote 404:

It is odd, but useful, to remember Coleridge’s fancy for stating propositions algebraically. If his definition were true, _a_ = _b_ or even (_a_ + _b_)^2 = _a_^2 + 2_ab_ + _b_^2 would be style at its very acme (cf. Addison in _Spec._ 62 on Euclid and Wit).

Footnote 405:

London, 1895.

Footnote 406:

Pp. 4, 5, 30, 35, 59, 82, 88.

Footnote 407:

P. 118 _sq._

Footnote 408:

P. 121.

Footnote 409:

P. 123.

Footnote 410:

Pp. 127-130.

Footnote 411:

P. 147. Cf. _sup._, p. 223.

Footnote 412:

Coleridge quotes neither Quintilian nor Dante, and was probably not thinking of either. But _we_ think of them.

Footnote 413:

P. 194.

Footnote 414:

_I.e._, “The faculty which makes many into one”—the creative imagination. This form is much better than “es_em_plastic,” which Coleridge adopts in the _Biographia_, for there one stumbles over the second syllable, and supposes it to be the preposition ἐν.

Footnote 415:

P. 258.

Footnote 416:

Pp. 274, 275.

Footnote 417:

P. 293.

Footnote 418:

Ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols., London, 1895.

Footnote 419:

i. 97, _ed. cit._

Footnote 420:

Miss Mary Evans, Miss Sarah Fricker, and an uncertainly Christian-named Miss Brunton. _More in excelsis Coleridgeano_ he, being engaged to No. 2 and desiring to marry No. 1, “hoped that he might be cured” by the “exquisite beauty and uncommon accomplishments” of No. 3. See a page or two (89) earlier.

Footnote 421:

P. 157.

Footnote 422:

P. 163.

Footnote 423:

P. 181.

Footnote 424:

P. 196.

Footnote 425:

P. 210. This was just after the as yet hollow healing of the first great quarrel in 1796.

Footnote 426:

P. 384. These passages are most important as showing how _early_ Coleridge dissented from Wordsworth.

Footnote 427:

P. 549.

Footnote 428:

P. 557.

Footnote 429:

P. 663.

Footnote 430:

_V. infra_, chap. iii.

Footnote 431:

_Coleridge_ (“English Men of Letters,” London, 1884), p. 156.

Footnote 432:

Ibid., pp. 46, 47.

Footnote 433:

See _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 316 _sq._ especially, for Coleridge’s magnificent “Spanish-Castlery” in connection.

Footnote 434:

6 vols., London, 1850.

Footnote 435:

4 vols., London, 1856. _The Letters to Caroline Bowles_ (London, 1881) are even fuller proportionately: and _Omniana_, the _Wesley_, the _Cowper_, _Espriella_, the _Colloquies_, with almost everything, contribute.

Footnote 436:

But see a very curious glimpse of resipiscence in _Letters_, ii. 171 _sq._

Footnote 437:

The projected _Rhadamanthus_, a periodical on something like the lines of the later _Retrospective Review_, was a real loss.

Footnote 438:

_Letters_, i. 69, and elsewhere, also, I think—_e.g., Life and Corr._, iv. 106. Wynn was evidently a precisian of Bysshism. For other noteworthy critical things in this collection, see i. 173 (Suggestion of Hist. Novels); ii. 91 (Crabbe); 214 (Engl. Hexameters); iii. (the various letters about English Hexameters); iv. 47, Sayers’ Poems. I give but few here, because the _Letters_ have an index. I wish these and my other references may prompt and help some one to examine, at greater length than would be possible or proper here, the literary opinions of the best-read man in England for some fifty years— 1790-1840.

Footnote 439:

It is unlucky that Guest’s _English Rhythms_ came too late in the evening of his day for him to carry out his expressed purpose of reviewing it. He evidently recognised its extraordinary value as a _Thesaurus_: and his summary of the earlier part as “worthless” is of course not deliberate or final, though it is a very natural expression in reference to Guest’s astonishing heresies on Shakespearian and Miltonic prosody. I know no one—not even Gray—who seems to have had, before the whole range of English verse was known, juster notions on the whole of English prosody. Even his wanderings after hexameters are not fatal.

Footnote 440:

_The Doctor_ (1 vol., London, 1848), p. 18.

Footnote 441:

P. 34.

Footnote 442:

P. 42.

Footnote 443:

P. 65.

Footnote 444:

P. 86.

Footnote 445:

P. 99.

Footnote 446:

P. 194.

Footnote 447:

P. 245. It is curious, by the way, that Southey bewails the absence in English of any synonym for the Spanish _desengaño_. That shows that “disillusionment,” one of those strictly analogous and justifiable neologisms which he rightly defends, had not then come into use.

Footnote 448:

P. 315.

Footnote 449:

P. 379.

Footnote 450:

P. 476.

Footnote 451:

P. 536.

Footnote 452:

P. 610.

Footnote 453:

Such an authority, for instance, as one of the reviewers of this poor book, who decided that “no man of critical genius” would have attempted to write it.

Footnote 454:

Some readers may like a few out of hundreds of possible references to _Life and Corr._, which has no Index: i. 85 (Ariosto and Spenser); 122 (Construction); 316-318 (Chapelain, before and after reading); ii. 197 (Greek and Latin taste in poetry); 211, 212 (Modern Ballads); iii. 9 (Archaisms and Neologisms); 140 (the Epistles in _Marmion_); 145 _sq._ (Rhyme, &c.); 205 (the purple patch in _Kehama_); 213, 265 (Advice to E. Elliott); 277 (blank verse); 295 (Spenser); iv. 301, 338 (very interesting, on a prophesied return of “preciousness” and “metaphysical” style in poetry); v. 245 (a never-carried-out plan of continuing Warton); v. 99 (his own method of writing); vi. 93 (To Bowles—reasons for not reviewing poetry).

Footnote 455:

The editions of Lamb in parts are now fortunately very numerous, and there are even several of the whole, some of which have been begun since the text was written. It is therefore superfluous to give pages, especially as the individual articles are almost always short. But I generally use the late R. H. Shepherd’s 1 vol. ed. of the _Works_ (London, 1875), and Canon Ainger’s of the _Letters_ (London, 1888).

Footnote 456:

_Table Talk_, pp. 313, 314, _ed. cit. inf._

Footnote 457:

_Winterslow_, p. 463, _ed. cit. inf._

Footnote 458:

Now, alas! become, between pen and press, the _late_ Master.

Footnote 459:

_Letters_, ed. Ainger, i. 162 _sq._, with the most amusing additional letter in the Appendix, p. 328 _sq._, on the wrath of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Footnote 460:

Ibid., i. 189, 190.

Footnote 461:

P. 207.

Footnote 462:

P. 286 _sq._

Footnote 463:

P. 290.

Footnote 464:

Ibid., ii. 105.

Footnote 465:

Even as the exquisite figure of Mrs Blake, sitting on the bedside, faces the sketches of gnashing fiends.

Footnote 466:

P. 138.

Footnote 467:

P. 278.

Footnote 468:

There may be people who do not know this, and those who know it already need not read it. A college cook (I think of Brasenose) was particularly famous for that most excellent dish the _fondue_, but would never tell his recipe. At last some Arthur Pendennis (of the other shop) got round him to this extent: “Why, sir,” said he, “you see I takes the eggs, and the butter, and the cheese, you know, and the other things; _and then I just fondoos ’em_.”

Footnote 469:

There is no complete ed. of Hunt, and there could not well be one. I shall refer here to the 7 vols. of Messrs. Smith & Elder’s cheap and uniform reprint of a good deal, and to the pretty American pocket issue of the _Italian Poets_.

Footnote 470:

At the beginning of the Essay on Restoration Drama.

Footnote 471:

Italian.

Footnote 472:

Of course it is not all unfavourable: Leigh Hunt is far too much of a critic and a lover of poetry for that. But he is constantly put off and put out by Dante’s “bigotry,” his “uncharitableness,” the “barbarous pedantries” of his age, and the like.

Footnote 473:

New ed., _ut sup._: London, 1883.

Footnote 474:

This is good, but not so good: and elsewhere—though critical matter will be found in all Hunt’s collected books and in all his uncollected periodical work, from the _Examiner_, “whose very name is Hunt,” and the _Indicator_, and the _Reflector_, to the _Tatler_, and the _London Journal_—we shall never find him better and seldom so good.

Footnote 475:

P. 51, _ed. cit._

Footnote 476:

It is curious what power that dead sorceress has had on almost all her poets.

Footnote 477:

P. 250, _ed. cit._

Footnote 478:

Preference only, of course: the exceptions are numerous, but not enough to destroy the rule.

Footnote 479:

References will be made here throughout to the reprints of Hazlitt’s literary work in the Bohn Library, 7 vols. This is to _The English Comic Writers_, p. 33. The newer and completer edition of Messrs Waller & Glover had but begun when the text was written.

Footnote 480:

Ibid., p. 170 _sq._, and p. 176 _sq._

Footnote 481:

He is, however, dangerously near requiring it with regard to Scott (see the end of the article on him in _The Spirit of his Age_), and whenever he speaks of the Duke of Wellington.

Footnote 482:

_English Poets_, ed. cit., pp. 92-95.

Footnote 483:

Pp. 18-25.

Footnote 484:

This favourite word of his has been adopted by all competent critics as best describing his own manner.

Footnote 485:

Pp. 19, 20.

Footnote 486:

The last page of _The English Poets_.

Footnote 487:

It is curious that the critic’s blunder had been anticipated, though not excused, by the author’s. Richardson of course _meant_ to make Lovelace what Hazlitt sees in him: only he failed.

Footnote 488:

In the paper on Sir Philip’s _Sonnets_, noted above.

Footnote 489:

Lect. vi., p. 201 _sq._

Footnote 490:

But not as unique as odd.

Footnote 491:

P. 181.

Footnote 492:

Pp. 115, 126. The elaborate characters of Bacon, &c., in this course should be compared with those of Pope, and others earlier.

Footnote 493:

P. 64, ed. cit.

Footnote 494:

P. 75.

Footnote 495:

P. 108.

Footnote 496:

P. 77.

Footnote 497:

P. 139.

Footnote 498:

P. 185.

Footnote 499:

P. 278. These passages may remind some of the story of one of George Sand’s old lovers pausing before a photograph of her in a shop-window, and saying to his companion, “Et je l’ai connue _belle_!”

Footnote 500:

P. 344.

Footnote 501:

The usual dog-metaphors are no triviality in regard to Hazlitt when he is in this mood. Every one who knows dogs must have noticed the way in which they often snarl, as if they could not help it; the growl and gnash are forced from them.

Footnote 502:

P. 441.

Footnote 503:

P. 449.

Footnote 504:

The end-note of this piece coincides curiously with a remark once made to me by a person unusually well acquainted with France but, I feel sure, quite unaware that he was echoing Hazlitt. “The Frenchman has a certain routine of phrases into which his ideas run habitually as into a mould; and you cannot get him out of them.”

Footnote 505:

P. 56.

Footnote 506:

P. 203.

Footnote 507:

Yet Hazlitt cannot resist a renewed fling at Sidney.

Footnote 508:

P. 351.

Footnote 509:

P. 150, ed. cit. I wish that some one, in these excerpting days, would extract and print together _all_ Hazlitt’s passages on Burke, Scott, and Coleridge.

Footnote 510:

P. 246.

Footnote 511:

P. 248.

Footnote 512:

P. 317.

Footnote 513:

P. 431.

Footnote 514:

“We have more faith in a well-written romance than in common history.”

Footnote 515:

In 1845, reviewing Horne’s very rashly entitled _New Spirit of the Age_. The review will be found in the 13th vol. (1886) of the ordinary ed. of Thackeray’s _Works_.

Footnote 516:

P. 173.

Footnote 517:

“Its strength is in its wings” is, in idea, of course, as old as Plato. But the nearest expression of it, the “la lyre est un instrument _ailé_” of Joubert, though by a man more than thirty years Hazlitt’s senior, was never, I think, published till ten years after Hazlitt’s death.

Footnote 518:

Below Hazlitt (who as well as Lamb praised him, though the former _more suo_ fell foul of him as well) may be best placed, in the note which is as much as he deserves, that much-written-of “curiosity of literature,” the poisoner, connoisseur, and coxcomb, Wainewright. “Janus,” however, was too much occupied with pictures, plays, bric-à-brac, Montepulciano, veal-pies in red earthenware dishes, the prize-ring, and other fancies or fopperies, to busy himself directly with literature, save, perhaps, in the curious paper “Janus Weatherbound,” which seems to have been _his_ “farewell to essay-writing.” It is, however, fair to say that, odious as he was in ways not merely moral, he had something of “a taste” here also. His quotations, which are numerous, are singularly well selected; he admired not merely Fouqué but Shelley long before it was the fashion to do so; and you may pick out of the works, rather probably than certainly his (_Essays and Criticisms_, by T. G. Wainewright, ed. W. C. Hazlitt: London, 1880), stray literary notes not without value.

Footnote 519:

I use for Blake Gilchrist’s _Life and Works_ (2nd ed., 2 vol., London, 1880), Mr Swinburne’s _William Blake_ (London, 1868), Mr Rossetti’s Aldine _Poetical Works_ (London, 1874), and Messrs Ellis and Yeats’s great Blakian Thesaurus (3 vols., London, 1893).

Footnote 520:

_V. sup._, ii. 391 note.

Footnote 521:

Letter to the _Monthly Magazine_ of July 1, 1806. “O Englishmen! know that every man ought to be a judge of pictures, and every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of his senses.” The whole letter is given by Mr Swinburne, pp. 62, 63, _op. cit._

Footnote 522:

In _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. Compare with this Vico’s famous doctrine that “the criterion on truth is to have _made_ it.”

Footnote 523:

Facsimiled in Ellis and Yeats, vol. iii. Printed as _Sibylline Leaves_ in Gilchrist, ii. 178, 180.

Footnote 524:

See in particular his admirable review of Godwin’s _Chaucer_, and his just condemnation of the absurd practice—simply wallowed in since by biographers and historians—of bolstering out a book with what the subject _might have_ seen, done, thought, or suffered.

Footnote 525:

The two qualities lauded above—knowledge and judgment—are specially noteworthy here, when we compare the article, not merely with the less fully informed work of Hurd, Percy, and Warton (not to say Ritson), but with more recent compositions by persons who had the originals easily at disposal.

Footnote 526:

They will also be found printed together in the two vols. of _Biographies_, of which they form the larger part.

Footnote 527:

_Periodical Criticism_, vol. ii.

Footnote 528:

In connection with Sir Walter, one may pay a note of tribute to the extreme and now too little known critical ability of his “discoverer,” J. L. Adolphus, whose _Letters to Heber on the Authorship of Waverley_ would come in well as an excursus-subject. Examining, as he did, certain known works of an at least hypothetically unknown writer, he was bound to give that attention to the _work itself_, which was the great thing necessary; and he gave it with remarkable ability, craftsmanship, and knowledge of literature.

Footnote 529:

Those who will not take the trouble to search the _Specimens_ themselves will find copious and admirably selected examples in Jeffrey’s article on the book (_Essays_, 1 vol. ed., p. 359 _sq._), one of the best reviews he ever wrote, but for some superfluous, unjust, and, in the context (_v._ above), specially ungenerous flings at Southey.

Footnote 530:

This may be found not merely in the edd. of the _Works_, but in Prof. Vaughan’s interesting selection of _Literary Criticism_ (London, 1896).

Footnote 531:

It is with some misgiving, and after more than one change of mind, that I place Shelley’s great poetical twin (or rather tally) in a note only here. I have already more than once referred (ii. 280, 412) to Keats’s perhaps one-sided but very vigorous and remarkable verse-formulation of the protest against Neo-classicism; the two prefaces (especially the final one) to _Endymion_ have been generally recognised by the competent as perhaps the most astonishingly just judgments which any poet has ever passed on himself: and the _Letters_ are full of critical or quasi-critical passages of the highest interest. I myself have a sheaf of them duly noted; and some persons of distinction whom I know would admit them to the very Golden Book of Criticism. I hope, however, that my own judgment is not too much sicklied o’er with crotchet in holding that Keats’s criticism of himself and others is somewhat too spontaneous and automatic, somewhat too much of a mere other phase of his creation, to deserve the name of criticism properly so-called. He speaks of Shakespeare admirably, because he has the same quintessentially English cast of poetry that Shakespeare had. When he speaks of poetry in the abstract, as he does admirably and often, it is this poetry speaking of herself, and therefore speaking truly but not critically. Even in the wonderful remark (vol. v. p. 111., ed. Forman, Glasgow, 1901) on himself and Byron, “He describes what he sees: I describe what I imagine” (where he repeats Philostratus without in the least knowing it), the thing is not criticism: it is self-speaking. And beyond this he seldom goes, and is seldomer happy in his rare excursions. He might have become a critic, as he might have become almost anything good; but I do not think he was one.

Footnote 532:

My copy is the eight-volume ed. of 1874-76: but the titles of the various pieces will enable them to be found in others.

Footnote 533:

See the opening of “Southey and Porson.” It is, of course, not improved by the presence of the Landorian irony, which is an uncertain quality, too often inclining either to horse-play or to peevishness: but this is not fatal.

Footnote 534:

See “Landor and Delille.”

Footnote 535:

_V. sup._, p. 66 _sq._

Footnote 536:

_V. sup._, ii. 491.

Footnote 537:

From 1801, when his edition appeared, till well into the ’Twenties. Mr. Rhys (_op. cit. sup._) has given some of Bowles’s rejoinders to Byron, with Byron’s own _Letter_, mentioned below, and some references to the battle in his _Introduction_.

Footnote 538:

They will be found usefully rearranged by himself in the extract of his answer to Byron given by Mr Rhys (Appendix to vol. ii., _op. cit._)

Footnote 539:

i. 262 _sq._

Footnote 540:

1821. To be found, outside the edd. of the author, in Mr Rhys’ book, ii. 162 _sq._

Footnote 541:

It has been suggested to me that Byron ought to have the benefit, as well as the disadvantage, of my description of Keats’s critical utterances on the other side, as a phase of his creation. There is something in this: but Byron seems to me less _genuine_ even on this showing.

Footnote 542:

The _Censura_, extending to 10 vols., but oftenest found incomplete, appeared in 1805-9. The _British Bibliographer_, _Restituta_, &c., came later.

Footnote 543:

First Series, 14 vols., 1820-26; Second, 2 vols., 1827-28. Its contributors included Hartley Coleridge, Talfourd (one of the persons whom I regretfully exclude here), and (in his earliest work) Thomas Wright.

Footnote 544:

Southern afterwards came in contact with Borrow at Madrid. See _The Bible in Spain_ and Dr Knapp’s _Life_.

Footnote 545:

There is none in the dates, but the title-page is different, the former vignette of a gateway (Trinity? “I cannot tell, I am an Oxford man”) disappearing, and being replaced by the editors’ names.

Footnote 546:

A so-called “_Third_ Series” (in 2 vols., 1854) can hardly be considered as really forming part of the original, from which it is separated by a thirty years’ interval.

Footnote 547:

It is the only adequate thing on him that I know.

Footnote 548:

Specially good are, in vol. iv., the dramatic papers; in v., one on _Witchcraft_; in vi., those on Coryat and Sir T. Urquhart; in vii., on Donne and Ariosto; in ix., on Chaucer (continued later); in x., on _Minor French Poetry_ (Dorat); in xii., on _Latin Plays at Cambridge_, and one of singular and wide-reaching merit on the _Roman Comique_; in xv., an interesting tracing of Scott’s quotations in the novels; in xvi., an admirable paper on Shadwell. But there is practically nothing negligible: and good taste, good manners, good temper, and good learning abound throughout.

Footnote 549:

_V. sup._, ii. 534.

Footnote 550:

His best _literary_ skit, “Bozzy and Piozzi,” deals with the _Tour_, not the _Life_.

Footnote 551:

The earlier _Rolliad_ is partly, but less, literary. For more on most of these I may refer to an essay of mine, _Twenty Years of Political Satire_, which originally appeared in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, and it reprinted in _Essays in English Literature_, 2nd series, London, 1895.

Footnote 552:

I do not think it necessary to give Gifford’s prose or periodical criticism a separate place. It is by no means easily separable as such; and if separated I fancy there would be very little to say for it, and that what would have to be said against it is better summed up in the words of no less a political sympathiser and personal friend than Scott. A “cankered carle” cannot be a good critic, any more than a mildewed grape can give good wine. But Gifford was not quite so bad as he has seemed to some; and his editorial work, especially on Jonson, deserves almost the highest praise.

Footnote 553:

I know, of course, that even Coleridge spoke unadvisedly about these immortal flowers. But he had got a “philosophical” craze at the moment: and he did not call them “stuff.”

Footnote 554:

_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_, London, pp. 36-63 of this the one vol. ed., 1853. The “Beauty” itself requires very little notice. It is an ingenious variation upon Alison, whose book it reviews, praises, and supports, with some unfairness to Gerard. But it abstains, almost comically and not uninstructively to an impartial thinker on æsthetics, from any definite literary applications.

Footnote 555:

He makes indeed an awkward slip by linking Machiavel as a contemporary with Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, and Galileo; but it is only recently, if even recently, that literary history has been carefully attended to, and Coleridge himself makes slips quite as bad.

Footnote 556:

How much of this was got from his author herself I leave to others to decide. A comparison with what has been said of her _supra_ may be “for thoughts.”

Footnote 557:

A fuller development of view about Jeffrey as a critic may be found in the present writer’s _Essays in English Literature_, First Series, pp. 100-134. Articles of his own specially worth examining are, besides the “Staël,” “Cowper,” “Ford,” “Keats,” and “Campbell’s _Specimens_,” those on _W. Meister_ (very curious and interesting), Richardson, Scott, and Byron (very numerous and full of piquancies), Crabbe, Wordsworth of course (though with as much wisdom as good feeling he kept much of the most offensive matter both on Wordsworth and Southey out), and Burns. In regard to the latter I cannot help thinking that he played the _Advocatus Diaboli_ better than either Mr Arnold, Mr Shairp, or my late friend Mr Henley.

Footnote 558:

The popularity, in late years, of the singularly uncritical words “sympathetic” and “unsympathetic” in describing Criticism, would of itself point to this necessity. It would seem impossible for a large number of persons to “like” otherwise than “grossly” in Dryden’s sense, or to imagine that any one else can like delicately, with discrimination, in the old sense “nicely.” A “sympathetic” notice or criticism is one which pours unmixed cataracts of what the cooks call oiled butter all over the patient: a notice that questions this part of him, rejects that, but gives due value to the gold and the silver and the precious stones, while discarding the hay and the stubble, is “unsympathetic.” Many years (many lustres even, alas!) ago, an old friend and colleague of mine, since distinguished in his own country as a critic, M. Paul Stapfer, complained that Englishmen, and still more Englishwomen, had only two critical categories—the “dry” and the “pretty.” These were unsatisfactory enough, but I think they were better than “sympathetic” and “unsympathetic” as now often used.

Footnote 559:

P. 5, in the convenient 1-vol. reprint of Messrs Ward and Lock (London: n. d.)

Footnote 560:

On the same page, ed. cit.

Footnote 561:

Who loved the Vulgate.

Footnote 562:

I decline to sully these pages with it: let it go to its own place, buckled neck and heels with Rapin’s on Nausicaa.

Footnote 563:

We could abandon Owen Felltham to him with more equanimity if he did not describe, as “vile English, or properly no English,” such words as “nested,” “parallel” as a verb, and “uncurtain,” all excellent English of the best brand and vintage, formed on the strictest and most idiomatic patents of analogy. There is still far too much criticastry and pedanticulism (here’s for them!) of this kind about, and men like Hallam are very mainly responsible for it. Even “obnubilate,” to which he also objects, is a perfectly good word, on all-fours with “compensate,” which he himself uses in the same context, though less usual. A sovereign of just weight, fineness, and stamp is none the worse for having been little circulated: nor is a word.

Footnote 564:

I can only think of one important blunder that he makes _as a historian_—the statement that Opitz “took Holland for his Parnassus.” Now Ronsard (_v. sup._, ii. 362) was not exactly a Dutchman.

Footnote 565:

His _Critiques et Études Littéraires_ (2 vols., Paris, 1857) contain many things upon which I should like to dwell, especially his discussion, in the _Globe_, of the _État de la Poésie Française_ in 1825. It is as good an expression of the views of the earlier, cooler, and more erudite Eclectic-Romantics as could be wished.

Footnote 566:

To be found in his _Essais Historiques et Littéraires_: Paris, 1862. The _Essais Philosophiques et Littéraires_ (Paris, 1875) may also be consulted: but, as the double titles may warn the wary, there is not much pure literature in either.

Footnote 567:

See the later _Conversations_, _passim_.

Footnote 568:

This, with Quintus Smyrnæus as make-weight, is a sort of wreckage or recovery from the lectures which were howled down at the Collége de France by anti-Imperialist students. It is the largest of its author’s classical studies: not perhaps the most interesting. The French professorial method, possibly in direct tradition from the time when authors were really (and in some cases almost merely) _read_ to students, seems to include a very large amount of simple abstract and “argument.” (“Priam conducts the young princess to the Palace: he honours her,” &c.) This is, from our point of view, rather surplusage, and at any rate more important on Quintus Smyrnæus than on Virgil. But we may note a reference (p. 73) to Mr Arnold’s _Preface_, then pretty new, which is an interesting thing.

Footnote 569:

There is naturally not much criticism here except the remark—in itself involving one of the few great commandments of criticism and one of the most frequently neglected—“il n’avait pas assez _lu_.”

Footnote 570:

In the case of a man who wrote so much and so often on the same things as Sainte-Beuve, an exhaustive general index would be a great assistance. There is a whole volume of _Table_ to the _Causeries_, properly so called, the _Portraits de Femmes_, and the _Portraits Littéraires_; while the _Premiers Lundis_ contains a succinct but very useful synopsis-index of all the works and substantive pieces, and _Port-Royal_ has an elaborate index of its own. But my copies of the _Portraits Contemporains_ (5 vols.) and the _Chateaubriand_ (2), as well as the 13 of the _Nouveaux Lundis_, are indexless.

Footnote 571:

Sainte-Beuve _could_ be dull, and his Senate speeches are most painful proofs of it. We know that the Senators who talked him inaudible had other reasons for their rudeness: but he almost provoked it apart from those reasons.

Footnote 572:

I know Balzac’s criticism, which is extensive, pretty well: but I shall do no such despite to his genius as to allow him to appear here in a character where he showed no genius at all.

Footnote 573:

Paris, 1828, and since.

Footnote 574:

This, however (5 vols., 1832-39), was probably the first collection that definitely announced its author to the world at large.

Footnote 575:

The first reissue (1844 ?) was only in two.

Footnote 576:

This is a crucial example. Sainte-Beuve had a just reverence for the powers of this Abdiel-Michael of aristocracy. He even seems a little daunted and dazzled by their sombre splendour. But he does not bring out their literary _quality_ as he would have done later.

Footnote 577:

I believe this charming book—made accessible for a time by the Brussels reprint of 1868—is again very rare. I once had the pleasure of introducing it to the late Lord Houghton, who told me afterwards that he had bought it “and dressed it up all in moons and stars.”

Footnote 578:

Vigny (in a passage which Sainte-Beuve himself quotes with singular blindness or singular boldness) puts the thing finally: _Il ne faut disséquer que les morts: cette manière de chercher à ouvrir le cerveau d’un vivant est fausse et mauvaise_ (A. de. V.'s _Journal_, quoted in _Port. Contemp._, final ed., ii. 79).

Footnote 579:

And, after all, let us remember that, on the testimony of the Goncourts (_Journal_, ii. 123), who have left some of the most offensive things against Sainte-Beuve, the critic, as late as 1863, rebuked Taine for belittling Hugo, in these memorable words, “Ne parlez pas d’Hugo. Vous ne le connaissez pas. Mais l'œuvre d’Hugo est magnifique!”

Footnote 580:

See for instance the opening (1832) of the “Lamartine” (i. 276).

Footnote 581:

_E.g._, to Crabbe, pp. 328-330; to Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 337-345. Sainte-Beuve, it is hardly necessary to say, was English of the quarter-blood.

Footnote 582:

The not quite “single speech” Ulric of that unforgettable piece, “Ils ont dit, L’amour passe et sa flamme est rapide.”

Footnote 583:

This contains the admirable, if in more than one sense generous, judgment of Schlegel (Wilhelm), that he _a eu l'œil à toutes les grandes choses littéraires, s’il n’a pas toujour rendu justice aux moyennes_. Omit _grandes_ in the first clause; substitute it for _moyennes_ and prefix _pleine_ to _justice_ in the second; and the thing becomes a fair verdict on Sainte-Beuve himself.

Footnote 584:

One of Sainte-Beuve’s defects (“for the man was mortal”) was an insufficient appreciation of the grotesque and the out-of-the-way.

Footnote 585:

He himself put it earlier—at 1840 or thereabouts. No doubt, as I have said above, the essays of the ’Forties as a whole do show a great advance. But I hardly recognise the full Sainte-Beuve before, say, the “Daunou” and the “Leopardi” of 1844.

Footnote 586:

The definitive edition was published in 1867-71 (the author died midway in 1869), in 7 vols.—6 of text, the first 5 of which average 600 pp. each, 1 of elaborate index, by that admirable student of the older French literature, M. de Montaiglon. The original dates of publication were 1840-60.

Footnote 587:

Unless we group with it Hazlitt’s, which is, in this instance, for thoughts. Your pure man of letters often has a morbid love of mere _force_.

Footnote 588:

The touch of we do not quite know what personal soreness breaks in whenever “René” is mentioned, even much later than this.

Footnote 589:

I fear that terrible charge, “il n'était pas gentilhomme,” is a little borne out by his intromitting with Chateaubriand’s annotated copy of the _Essai sur les Révolutions_, which he uses to fix anti-religious and anti-monarchical opinions on the writer. You have no business, at any rate till centuries have passed, with a man’s private comment on his published writings. It is mere eavesdropping once removed.

Footnote 590:

i. 91.

Footnote 591:

i. 132.

Footnote 592:

_Ch. et s. G._, i. 233, 234.

Footnote 593:

ii. 37.

Footnote 594:

ii. 91.

Footnote 595:

Ibid., 97.

Footnote 596:

Ibid., 114.

Footnote 597:

Ibid., 340.

Footnote 598:

The _Constitutionnel_ first, then the _Moniteur_. Here, as elsewhere, I do not burden the text with details which are in all the biographical dictionaries.

Footnote 599:

I wonder whether Mr Arnold got “Stagirius” from Sainte-Beuve, or direct from Saint-Marc Girardin, who seems to have extracted him originally from the Golden-mouth? So, too, did _Sohrab and Rustum_ come from the “Firdousi” article? These interesting suggestions of suggestion—as interesting as the ordinary plagiarism and parallel-passage inquiries of bad and dull critics, are dull and bad— occur with Sainte-Beuve more often than with almost any man.

Footnote 600:

The adventure was kept up, so far as I remember, for four subsequent years with equal punctuality. The Chapel, in Criticism of Our Lady of the Broken Lances has never seen such a paladin.

Footnote 601:

The same applies to the protest, interesting as a _cri du cœur_ and a statement of life-purpose, but mistaken, against Taxile Delord (xi. 400-403). The punishment too much dignifies the offence—and the offender.

Footnote 602:

There is rhetoric enough in Gibbon, of course; but it is not the rhetoric that the French love.

Footnote 603:

Sainte-Beuve’s fancy for Feydeau was a subject of wonder to friends of his who were not in the least prudish. It waned, however, and the signs of the waning are the subject of an anecdote, slightly too Rabelaisian to quote here, but very amusing.

Footnote 604:

He himself has said truly and nobly of one of the few who _did_ escape them—Gautier: “Jamais un sentiment mauvais, soit de hauteur soit de jalousie mesquine, n’est entre dans [son] âme.” To be thus is to be one of ten thousand: even to kick the bad thoughts out when they present themselves is no common merit (_N. L._, vi. 325).

Footnote 605:

Rather tantalisingly as to the _number_ of fulfilments. But the papers on the Greek Anthology in vol. vii. are exquisite in _quality_.

Footnote 606:

I do not forget either Mr Arnold or Mr Pater: but they look at antiquity in a different way.

Footnote 607:

The _Lundis_ (though that is not their fault) have perhaps given a rather terrible amount of “knowledge which is not knowledge” at second hand or further. I have often smiled at seeing some honest, if not consummate, first-hand study of a subject loftily pooh-poohed, by some one who evidently knew nothing of it but what he had learnt from Sainte-Beuve.

Footnote 608:

Longinus, c. xxxv. _sub. fin._

Footnote 609:

He was Professor of it for years; he was a constant contributor to the _Deux Mondes_; he welcomed the new study of Old French, and took early part in it. But if any reader wants any more from me on him I must refer to “A Paradox on Quinet” in my _Miscellaneous Essays_ (London, 1892), p. 274 _sq._; on Michelet, to an article in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.

Footnote 610:

Edd. so numerous that reference to particular ones would be very little helpful: the original dates of important works will be specified.

Footnote 611:

1864.

Footnote 612:

1827.

Footnote 613:

1828.

Footnote 614:

1834.

Footnote 615:

There is a very curious and interesting half-palinode, half-explanation, as to “art-for-art” here, which is worth noting.

Footnote 616:

_V. sup._, i. 272, note.

Footnote 617:

Paris, 1894.

Footnote 618:

Paris, 1891.

Footnote 619:

Begun in 1844, finished in 1861, and often reprinted.

Footnote 620:

In his later days, too, the very disgust at being himself kept from producing literature kept him from dealing with it, and threw him upon the theatrical and artistic subjects in which he had indeed a great, but only a secondary, interest.

Footnote 621:

There are some very noteworthy things in the early articles recovered and reprinted posthumously in _Fusains et Eaux-Fortes_ (Paris: 1890).

Footnote 622:

Vol. i. p. 19.

Footnote 623:

But never, I think, _without_ date—a blessing for which one cannot be too truly thankful to M. Du Camp or somebody else.

Footnote 624:

He seems to have _canonised_ himself: his godfathers and godmothers had been contented to call him Marc.

Footnote 625:

The _Cours_, in 5 vols. (afterwards 4), (Paris, 1843 _sq._); the _Essais_, in 2 (Paris, 1845).

Footnote 626:

It is fair to say that Sainte-Beuve’s references to him are not quite trustworthy. There was probably some jealously.

Footnote 627:

As Claude Vignon in _Béatrix_.

Footnote 628:

Part of his collected work deals with Art. The rest—_Portraits Littéraires_ (1836-49), _Nouveaux Portraits Littéraires_ (1854), and _Études sur l'École Français_, (1855)—are out of print. The copies I _possess_ consist of _Portraits Littéraires_, 2 vols. (Paris, 1854), and _Nouveaux P. L._, 2 vols., 1855.

Footnote 629:

_P. L._, i. 112-181, and _N. P. L._, i. 193-353, consist of Hugo articles.

Footnote 630:

See _N. P. L._, ii. 67 _sq._

Footnote 631:

Who has _P. L._, i. 81-112, and _N. P. L._, i. 45-193.

Footnote 632:

“Ce serait plus simple d'écrire en Grec.”

Footnote 633:

_P. L._, i. 325-367.

Footnote 634:

Paris, 1838.

Footnote 635:

2 vols., Paris, 1843.

Footnote 636:

Paris, 1845.

Footnote 637:

If any one is inclined—as some may be—to apply to this book Mérimée’s own censure of Ticknor and other literary historians for putting things in merely because they have read them, let me simply quote here the names of Henri de Latouche, of Fiorentino, and of Ozanam, to which I could add many others.

Footnote 638:

In the Introduction to _Lettres à une autre Inconnue_ (Paris, 1875), p. xlv.

Footnote 639:

Third ed., Paris, 1876.

Footnote 640:

Ibid., 1874.

Footnote 641:

In the _Portraits_.

Footnote 642:

In the _Mélanges_.

Footnote 643:

Also in the _Portraits_, where the shorter paper on Nodier has some excellent criticism.

Footnote 644:

Rather oddly pitchforked into the _Carmen_ volume; the others are in the _Portraits_.

Footnote 645:

_Schriften_, ed. Roth, 8 vols. in 9: Berlin, 1821-42. The second part of the eighth volume is wholly occupied by one of the best indices that I know in any German book—a very special blessing in the case of a writer like Hamann.

Footnote 646:

i. 509.

Footnote 647:

ii. 376-413.

Footnote 648:

iii. 81.

Footnote 649:

Who is mentioned in the same passage for his discourse on _Fables_.

Footnote 650:

He speaks, for instance (ii. 437, saying, of course, that he will _not_ speak), of “our æsthetic” as “Bohemian glass”; of the “falsity of its subtlety,” &c.

Footnote 651:

He describes himself in a letter to Reichardt, of June 1777 (v. 248), as spending the livelong day in reading “the Greek Testament, some classic, or _Shakespeare_.” Fifteen years earlier, in one of the maddest-looking of his tract-groups (_Essais à Mosaïque_, vol. ii.), written in French and giving itself out as written in England, “at Bedlam,” “Tyburn Road,” &c., he had pronounced Falstaff “unique”: and his quotations from _Hamlet_, at a time when the future author of _Wilhelm Meister_ was scarcely breeched, are frequent.

Footnote 652:

9 vols.: Göttingen, 1844-47.

Footnote 653:

v. 93.

Footnote 654:

v. 331.

Footnote 655:

In vols. i. and ii.

Footnote 656:

ii. 383.

Footnote 657:

i. 283 _sq._ He is very interesting here to compare and contrast with Goethe.

Footnote 658:

i.-xx. of the 60-vol. ed. (Stuttgart, 1827). I have in some cases sought to compare, but have not been able continuously to work with, the much better ed. of Suphan (32 vols.: Berlin, 1877-1887).

Footnote 659:

The phrase is De Quincey’s and a good one: but it does not occur in his Essay on Herder, which is one of the most unsatisfactory things he ever did.

Footnote 660:

_Einleitung_ to the _Fragmente_ (1767), ed. cit., i. 9.

Footnote 661:

I am not yet sure whether Vico exercised much influence on Herder in this direction: but Herder certainly ranks next to Vico as a leader in it, and had as much more immediate and wide-spreading influence as he had less originality and force. Professor Flint, I may say, thinks the actual connection of the two slight.

Footnote 662:

Ed. cit., vols. i. and ii.

Footnote 663:

The Germans had been creditably troubled about their prosodic souls ever since Opitz (see the large concernment of this matter in Borinski, _op. cit. sup._); and the middle of the eighteenth century saw the strict iambic Alexandrines of Opitz himself and others deserted, partly for the so-called “British” or Miltonic scansion (decasyllables with certain licences of substitution), partly for classical metres and unrhymed “Pindarics,” both of which had a great reflex influence on ourselves.

Footnote 664:

1769. Ed. cit., vols. xiii., xiv.

Footnote 665:

_V. sup._ pp. 47, 48.

Footnote 666:

Vol. xv.

Footnote 667:

Vols. xv., xvi.

Footnote 668:

For this and the rest see ed. cit., vols. xvii.-xx.

Footnote 669:

See xviii. 65-99.

Footnote 670:

His Shakespearian passages are numerous; see especially xvii. 228 _sq._

Footnote 671:

There can be no doubt that, here as elsewhere, Herder was administering a much-needed correction to the ridiculous Chauvinism of Klopstock, who was wont to extol German language and literature over all languages and literatures—past, present, and future, actual, possible, and impossible.

Footnote 672:

Let me only add a reference to his own interesting sketch of German criticism up to his time. _Ideen_, ii. 55, 56, ed. cit. xvi. 159 _sq._

Footnote 673:

I have used the ed. in 36 vols., Leipzig, 1839-40.

Footnote 674:

29-36 in ed. cit.

Footnote 675:

xxix. 129 _sq._

Footnote 676:

xxxiii. 255.

Footnote 677:

In same vol.

Footnote 678:

In the _Bibliothek der Weltlitteratur_ of Cotta (Stuttgart, n. d.), which I use. Besides the texts more particularly noted above, _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ is perhaps the chief place to be examined: but nothing can be quite neglected. Readers confined to English may profitably consult _Criticism, Reflections, and Maxims of Goethe_ (London, n. d.), ed. by W. B. Rönnfeldt, who thinks Goethe “probably the greatest literary and art critic whom the world has seen.”

Footnote 679:

Goethe would probably not himself have refused this ascription, but might, on the contrary, have welcomed it. He even wanted the _Nibelungen_ in prose: and more than once, I think, adopts translateableness as a _criterion_ of Poetry (_v. inf._ note, p. 368). But this does not bridge, it only deepens, the gulf. Again, it may be, and has been, urged that in the _Hamlet_ piece he was avowedly speaking from the theatrical point of view in every direction. True again: but if anybody, with such literature as _Hamlet_ before him, can take this point of view, we know that his heart and his treasure lie, not in the book, but on the boards.

Footnote 680:

_Allgemeine Begriffe und grosser Dünkel sind immer auf dem Wege entsetzliches Unglück anzurichten._—_Spr. in Pro._, ed. cit., p. 109.

Footnote 681:

Ibid., p. 129.

Footnote 682:

_Gehöre uns an_, p. 128.

Footnote 683:

P. 177.

Footnote 684:

P. 216.

Footnote 685:

P. 143.

Footnote 686:

P. 178.

Footnote 687:

Pp. 165-169.

Footnote 688:

_Schönste_, which, with _Geist_, is a little difficult to translate adequately. But it coincides interestingly with Lamb’s, “one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing,” of Hazlitt.

Footnote 689:

We all laugh with Dickens when Lord Frederick Verisopht sums up Shakespeare as “a clayver man.” Yet it may be doubted whether Goethe had not in effect anticipated his lordship. It is almost always as the “clever” _man_, not as the Prospero of the poetic moment, that he considers Shakespeare.

Footnote 690:

_V. sup._ p. 167.

Footnote 691:

xxvii. and xxviii. The former is devoted to “German,” the latter (in part) to “Foreign” literature. This last contains much of interest, especially on French and English books of the last decade of Goethe’s life, and on Folk-Verse.

Footnote 692:

Who probably meant “panoptic.” A work can be panoramic; an intellect hardly.

Footnote 693:

xxvii. 25.

Footnote 694:

xxviii. 60.

Footnote 695:

I can give one very egregious example of this. The famous phrase, “Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,” has been seen from a very early period to have an allegorical, as well as a literal, interpretation. Indeed, in the Latin original (for the words are a translation, as genius translates, of Lucan, ii. 273, _Pacem summa tenent_) the context is perfectly unmistakable. I had myself fallen in love with _Ueber allen Gipfeln_ when I got the _Gedichte_ as a school-prize in the year 1860, and both the possible interpretations had struck me. Yet a very few years ago, for giving the _poetical_ application, I was solemnly warned by a reviewer that there was nothing disgraceful in my not knowing German, but that to pretend to do so, and to give an impossible meaning to well-known words, was quite intolerable.

Footnote 696:

_Gespräche mit Goethe_ (3 vols., Stuttgart), i. 50.

Footnote 697:

i. 66. It has been urged, not without justice, that this intense _craftsmanship_ must fairly be taken into account in estimating his criticism. He is always identifying himself with the worker rather than the spectator-reader, thinking of the process rather than of the result.

Footnote 698:

i. 70.

Footnote 699:

i. 102.

Footnote 700:

Or at least “opponents”—_Gegner_, i. 104, 105.

Footnote 701:

i. 116.

Footnote 702:

i. 118.

Footnote 703:

i. 120.

Footnote 704:

1824.

Footnote 705:

i. 166.

Footnote 706:

i. 121.

Footnote 707:

P. 125. Cf. what has been said above.

Footnote 708:

P. 134.

Footnote 709:

“Everything Pope said and thought of his friend was good and noble”— _The English Humourists._

Footnote 710:

P. 182.

Footnote 711:

P. 184. And again, the _craftsman’s_ point of view must be allowed for. Flemming “will not help the _poet of 1830_,” is what he means.

Footnote 712:

P. 193.

Footnote 713:

P. 219.

Footnote 714:

P. 233.

Footnote 715:

(_I.e._, the poetry of the horrible and the miserable) p. 245.

Footnote 716:

P. 9.

Footnote 717:

P. 26.

Footnote 718:

P. 33.

Footnote 719:

ii. 162.

Footnote 720:

P. 180.

Footnote 721:

Pp. 184, 194.

Footnote 722:

With reinforcements from Soret, the Genevese botanist and mineralogist.

Footnote 723:

iii. 29, “Jenes ungestörte unschuldige, nachtwandlerische Schaffen.”

Footnote 724:

P. 86.

Footnote 725:

P. 99.

Footnote 726:

He had earlier said that Shakespeare and Molière did just the reverse.

Footnote 727:

P. 102.

Footnote 728:

P. 110.

Footnote 729:

P. 161.

Footnote 730:

I could make this point even clearer by putting together and enlarging upon his Shakespearian criticism: but this would take too much room, and it has been done in sample already. The English reader will find the chief texts collected in the first sixty pages of Mr Ronnfeldt’s book, cited above.

Footnote 731:

ii. 10 _sq._

Footnote 732:

P. 184 _sq._

Footnote 733:

I do not forget his reviews of _Don Juan_, _Manfred_, and _Cain_: nor the rather astonishing attribution to _Don Juan_ itself of being the first book to supply English with “a polished comic language.”

Footnote 734:

iii. 40.

Footnote 735:

Once more the sordid “business” view which we noticed in regard to Flemming seems to have crept over him. He did, of course, admire the _Nibelugen_, and the Ballads, and some other things. But his general belittlement remains.

Footnote 736:

Vols. xii.-xv. of the Cotta ed.

Footnote 737:

_V. sup._, p. 368, and inf., p. 389.

Footnote 738:

_V. inf._, p. 396.

Footnote 739:

All these are in vol. xii. ed. cit.

Footnote 740:

“On the Ground of Pleasure in Tragic Objects,” and “On the Tragic Art.” Vol. xiii.

Footnote 741:

“Über Anmuth und Würde,” “Über das Pathetische,” “Zerstreute Betrachtungen,” and “Über die aesthetische Erziehung der Menschen.” All these fall under our exclusion of pure æsthetic, after the earliest examples in each country.

Footnote 742:

The adjectives do not give the force of their originals. Schiller meant the poets who are not _self-conscious_ and those who are.

Footnote 743:

_V. inf._, p. 395.

Footnote 744:

In a note subjoined when the review was republished, eleven years after its first appearance, after Bürger’s death, and after Schlegel’s counter-blow.

Footnote 745:

Unfortunately the Bürger review is not the only one, of the small handful given us, in which Schiller “harps and carps” in this evil fashion. That on _Egmont_ is almost as bad.

Footnote 746:

Herr Boas, _op. cit. inf._, cites Gervinus as saying that his investigations entirely confirmed the _Xenien_ estimates. I have not verified the quotation, but I know enough of Gervinus (see on him _inf._) to be certain that his judgment would have been equally accommodating whatever these estimates had been.

Footnote 747:

The most convenient subject for such a study known to me is the _Schiller und Goethe im Xenien-kampf_ of Eduard Boas (Stuttgart und Tübingen, 2 vols., 1851), which gives the text with all necessary apparatus, and a long account, with specimens, of the retorts of the victims and the appurtenant literature generally. I exclude, of course, from the remarks in the text the _Tabulæ Votivæ_, &c.

Footnote 748:

No doubt there are exceptions. Goethe’s best seem to me 278 (directed, it is said, at F. Schlegel) and the rather ill-natured but clever _Charade_ (282). Schiller was happy in 346 on Gottsched as Tantalus: but any one could, and can, shoot Gottsched sitting.

Footnote 749:

4 vols. in the Cotta collection. This also contains Schiller’s correspondence with Körner, which should be compared.

Footnote 750:

1795-96.

Footnote 751:

Letter 309, May 5, 1797; ed. cit., ii. 96.

Footnote 752:

All the pieces here mentioned will be found in the Cotta ed. of Bürger’s _Ausgewählte Werke_. The epigram on Goethe’s doubling the part of artist and minister (ii. 78, ed. cit.) has much more satiric quality than most of the _Xenien_ themselves possess.

Footnote 753:

Ed. cit., ii. 208. But Bürger ought to have faced the question, “If the asafœtidarian poet has travelled, and been convinced of roses, what then?” See, however, some notable things here on Style, &c.

Footnote 754:

See his _Works_, or separately in two volumes of Cotta’s _Bibliothek_. The note cited is at i. 43. Observe that Richter was by no means a partisan Wielandist.

Footnote 755:

In the Essay which opens the _Miscellanies_.

Footnote 756:

A not unamiable reviewer has suggested that if I would draw up a neat tabular contrast of “Classic” and “Romantic,” and put it—mounted on linen, I presume, but he did not say so—in a pocket of this volume, it would be useful, especially for examinations. I am afraid I do not regard examinations in a sufficiently orthodox spirit to make any effort to supercram their crammableness, and I hope I have more wit than to attempt to define anything. Something, however, will be found in the Interchapters of this volume which may stimulate if it does not satisfy. The rest of the _Lector Benevolus_ may consider as destined to form part _du Quart Livre_, if I may speak Pantagruelically.

Footnote 757:

The chief—a kind of classic—is R. Haym’s _Die Romantische Schule_ (Berlin, 1870). Dr. Brandes’s later work on the subject, as on much else that we touch, should not need recommendation.

Footnote 758:

_Novalis Schriften_ (3 vols., 1 and 2, 5th ed., Berlin 1837, 3, 1st ed., ibid., 1846), i. 239. Appendix-note to _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_.

Footnote 759:

Translating it, with other things, in his Essay on Novalis.

Footnote 760:

_Cosas de Inglaterra_ generally appear to have been (as he confesses, Shakespeare partly was) “dark” to Novalis. His is the famous statement that “every Englishman is an island.” Now islands form the most beautiful and delightful part of the earth’s surface: but you must go to them to know them.

Footnote 761:

P. 179.

Footnote 762:

P. 180.

Footnote 763:

P. 185.

Footnote 764:

Pp. 187, 188.

Footnote 765:

P. 190.

Footnote 766:

P. 195.

Footnote 767:

iii. 164.

Footnote 768:

iii. 164.

Footnote 769:

P. 168.

Footnote 770:

P. 174.

Footnote 771:

P. 176. _All_ the context here is precious.

Footnote 772:

4 vols., Leipzig, 1848-52. I fear it was not widely bought, for the first edition seems never to have gone out of print.

Footnote 773:

Leipzig, 1855.

Footnote 774:

One of the unluckiest is on _The Second Maiden’s Tragedy_ (i. 320), where he observes on the lines—

“If you can construe but your doctor’s bill, _Parse_ your wife’s waiting-women.” “_Parse?_ Was kann es bedeuten?” “_Pierce_ ist dem aufmerksamen Auge leserlich genug.”

Here one can only open one’s eyes at the question, and smother one’s reply.

Footnote 775:

The _Works_ of Friedrich (except some _Juvenilia_) are included in a complete edition (Vienna, 1846) in fifteen vols., of which the first eight are entirely filled with critical matter. Of August Wilhelm, besides the _Sämmtliche Werke_ (12 vols., Leipzig, 1846), there are three vols. of French and two of Latin works, and also the _Lectures_, which were not published till 1884 (Heilbronn).

Footnote 776:

They were redistributed later in the _Works_ of the brothers and in A. W.'s _Kritische Schriften_. But it is good to read, and possess, the original _Characteristiken und Kritiken_ (2 vols., Königsberg, 1801).

Footnote 777:

I should think better of the criticism of Germany if it did not habitually speak of “Romeo und Juli_a_.” In the first place, it is surely common good manners not to alter an author’s title—though you may abbreviate it. In the second, which is more important, the change argues an æsthetic and gynæcologic callousness. Juli_a_ and Juli_et_ are quite different persons.

Footnote 778:

Schlegel was twenty-nine at the date of the earliest, and sixty-one when the book was published. The climacteric of accomplished youth and that of not yet absolutely declining age could not be much better hit off.

Footnote 779:

i. 74-164.

Footnote 780:

It opens the second vol., and goes to p. 81.

Footnote 781:

_V. sup._, p. 81. That which follows on Voss, Matthisson, and Schmidt is rather over full of citation.

Footnote 782:

I have already waived the controversy between Coleridge and the Schlegels. The fact is that the resemblance is mainly one of _attitude_—one of those results of “skyey influences” which constantly manifest themselves in different persons of genius and talent more or less simultaneously. And it may be added that the _general_ presence of this attitude in Coleridge before his German visit, before either Schlegel had attained any great notoriety, or had written anything likely to penetrate to England, or even anything very characteristic, is attested not merely by the concrete document, in not so very alien material, of _The Ancient Mariner_, but by testimonies as to his conversation, from half a dozen different people.

Footnote 783:

It is No. 19, which describes Æsthetics as “the salt which dutiful disciples are going to put on the tail of the Ideal (enjoined upon them as so necessary to poetry), _as soon as they get near enough_.”

Footnote 784:

Nor had Schlegel attained the art of grasping and exhibiting a writer, not merely as Sainte-Beuve was to do, but even as Johnson had done. The “Chamfort” in this book (i. 338-365) show this.

Footnote 785:

_Gespr. mit Eck._, iii. 100. Effeminacy, as well as coxcombry, was frequently charged against him: and the unpopularity of both brothers as persons was very great. But this Camarina, like all such, is better unstirred.

Footnote 786:

i. 47, ed. cit. He is “the last in value as in time,” of ancient critics, “the inventor of sentimental æsthetic,” “empty of ideas.” “All which propositions I for the present content myself,” as Carlyle observes in another matter, “with modestly, but peremptorily and irrevocably, denying.”

Footnote 787:

P. 49. He bewails their “practical sterility,” their “muddle of Art and Nature” (_das man Kunst und Natur so durcheinander warf_), &c.

Footnote 788:

He praises the _mot_, “According to Burke, the Beautiful is a tolerably pretty strumpet, and the Sublime is a grenadier with a big moustache.” Who said this?

Footnote 789:

In several places, especially iii. 62, 63. There is a useful index to these lectures: but their condition requires a full table of contents.

Footnote 790:

ii. 210, 313.

Footnote 791:

The first and less complete issue, in 10 vols., was in 1821-25.

Footnote 792:

Ed. cit., vols. i. and ii.

Footnote 793:

Vols. iii., iv., v.

Footnote 794:

Vol. vi.

Footnote 795:

Vol. viii.

Footnote 796:

Ibid.

Footnote 797:

_Gesammelte Werke_, 6 vols., in the Cotta Library.

Footnote 798:

Most of his best things were published by 1815, and many of these had been written years before.

Footnote 799:

They fill 4 out of the 6 vols., as given in ed. cit.

Footnote 800:

I have used the _second_ edition (Breslau, 1820). The first appeared in 1818, as a mere booklet in comparison.

Footnote 801:

_Vorlesungen über Æsthetik_: Leipzig, 1829.

Footnote 802:

P. 7.

Footnote 803:

De Quincey’s Essay on Schlosser (_Works_, vol. vii.) is disfigured by his usual rather boisterous fooling and rigmarole, but very sound in the main.

Footnote 804:

Vol. ii. Bk. VI. chap. iii. I do not yet know Molledano (R. y P. R.), _Historia literaria de España_, 9 (10) vols. 4to, 1769-79.

Footnote 805:

See also _infra_ in the last chapter of the next Book. I suppose the name most likely to be missed here is that of Ugo Foscolo. The author of the _Letters of Jacopo Ortis_ must seem, to those who think Rousseau a critic, to be another, and the commentator on Petrarch and Dante certainly was one. But I think we can do without him.

Footnote 806:

II. 216.

Footnote 807:

_V. sup._, p. 386.

Footnote 808:

See the Addenda-Corrigenda in this vol. for Dennis’s counter-assertion.

Footnote 809:

Certain persons would, of course, omit even the provisos here: but of them I take no keep.

Footnote 810:

The Germans did it rather earlier but not so well: the French almost if not quite as well and more voluminously, but later.

Footnote 811:

The second Essay of the _Miscellanies_, vol. i.

Footnote 812:

A hit, of course, at Coleridge, as, I suppose, is that above about “the nature of _the poet_.”

Footnote 813:

This celebrated tractate, which cannot be too much honoured as a Counsel of Perfection, may be said to have started the belief, comfortable for those who entertain it, that all who follow not their notion of “Philosophy” and “the Idea” are “Completed Bunglers.” “Perhaps so, my dear! perhaps so,” as an excellent Bishop of the Roman branch of the Catholic Church is said to have once remarked to a little vulgar boy who told him he was “no gentleman.”

Footnote 814:

Carlyle, in a very fine passage, admits their acceptance of “all true singers of every age and clime.” I fear the Devil’s Advocate’s devil, if you gave him a little time, could collect a curious _dossier_ of contrary instances: but this matters little. They _are_ entitled to credit for maintaining and spreading this catholic faith. But even Dryden, according to his lights, had championed it a century earlier; Gray, if he could have shaken off the deadly sin of Accidia—the deadliest to the man of letters—would have been Herder + either Schlegel, and more also, long before any of them; and Coleridge is Coleridge, however much he may have annoyed Carlyle at Highgate.

Footnote 815:

P. 233 of the vol. for the University—year 1902-3.

Footnote 816:

The rest of this Interchapter may be taken—like the two Appendices—as a sample of that fourth volume of “Critical Excursus” which I should have liked to give, had I thought that readers would endure it.

Footnote 817:

Add some other blessings, as that the periodical can contradict itself—which the book sometimes does, but should not.

Footnote 818:

I beg pardon: when I wrote the above I had not read the boast of the gentleman who could “come to a pile of new books, tear the entrails out of them, and write a 1500-word _causerie_, passably stylistic, all within sixty minutes”! But perhaps this also was irony?

Footnote 819:

I take my examples as usual from English; but, as usual, nothing but the consideration of space prevents me from adducing French and German parallels.

Footnote 820:

It was originally published, remember, before the death of Coleridge, and well within the period of our Book, even as to English.

Footnote 821:

It is of course impossible to appreciate this stanza fully except as a modification, and in comparison with other modifications, of the normal decasyllabic quatrain of _Gondibert_ and _Annus Mirabilis_. Yet persons calling themselves critics have sometimes been amusingly indignant at the suggestion of this obvious fact.

Footnote 822:

The original form of this, in 1832-33, was less perfect, but the aim and the principle are there already.

Footnote 823:

Mr Hall Caine, in his _Cobwebs of Criticism_ (London, 1883); Mr E. Stevenson, in a useful and unpretentious collection of _Early Reviews_ (London, n. d.), &c., &c.

Footnote 824:

“Poetry has this much at least in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.” There may seem to be an ironic touch in this: but the whole article is written to the text.

Footnote 825:

_V. sup._, vol. i. p. 252.

Footnote 826:

These texts can be seen in detail in more than one modern book on Tennyson, and wholly in Mr Churton Collins’s painstaking and useful reprint of the _Early Poems_ (London, 1900).

Footnote 827:

His books are too numerous to catalogue, and too equal in merit and defect to select from.

Footnote 828:

_Tableau de la marche, &c., de la Littérature Française_: Paris, 1828. It may also be found at the end of the Didot ed. of La Harpe’s _Cours de Littérature_.

Footnote 829:

He was a friend of my father’s in his English days, and I remember long ago seeing letters of his signed “Chasles _d’Almar_,” after a not uncommon French fashion.

Footnote 830:

It fills perhaps the major part of the great collection of articles called _Les Œuvres et les Hommes_ (15 vols., Paris, 1860-95).

Footnote 831:

xi. 72.

Footnote 832:

See vol. xiii. of _Les Œuvres et les Hommes_.

Footnote 833:

Note that the last outrage—_commune_—avenges Miss Austen of Madame de Staël.

Footnote 834:

xii. 245.

Footnote 835:

_Mélanges et Lettres_, 4 vols., Paris: 1876-77.

Footnote 836:

_Op. cit._, i. 34 _sq._

Footnote 837:

Printed in vol. iv.

Footnote 838:

i. 432.

Footnote 839:

i. 521.

Footnote 840:

ii. 389.

Footnote 841:

iii. 128.

Footnote 842:

iv. 151.

Footnote 843:

Not a little of the later published _Pensées_ (Paris, 1880) is definitely literary in subject; but the book is a small one, and its contents seem to me to lack something of the absolute spontaneity and _privacy_ of the larger and earlier collection. There are, however, noteworthy things; let me mention, as one of several for honour, the important dictum, p. 24, that “une forte mémoire _ne dénature pas_ assez ce qu’on imite,” where Doudan trembles on the verge of that truth which so few have reached, that art is _dis_realisation. Not so good is the wish that Scott had attempted Wellington or Napoleon as a hero, for it shows that Doudan was unwilling to accept (what nevertheless, as the context shows, he half saw) the cardinal law of the Historical Novel, that the main personages must _not_ be historical.

Footnote 844:

For an article in the _Fortnightly Review_ (May 1880).

Footnote 845:

For the reprint and completion of that article in _Miscellaneous Essays_ (London, 1892).

Footnote 846:

In the _Avenir de la Science_.

Footnote 847:

See his _Derniers Essais de Critique et d’Histoire_ (Paris, 1894), a remarkably representative collection (though, of course, not dispensing the reader who really wishes to know, from consulting the earlier collections of the same general heading), and one specially to be recommended to those who only know the _Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_. The _Letters_, earlier and later, I have not drawn upon.

Footnote 848:

_V. sup._, p. 307.

Footnote 849:

_Journal des Goncourt_, ii. 123.

Footnote 850:

The first of these is _Les vies illustres s'éteignent sur tous les points du monde, comme les mille flambeaux d’une fête qui finit_. On this Taine’s comment is, “tout homme qui a tenu une plume tressaille en la lisant.” Most true: but how about time, place and _milieu_? The other is an exquisite conceit about the girl-speakers in the _Decameron_.

Footnote 851:

In _Nouveaux Lundis_, and _Études Critiques_, respectively. M. Montégut’s deliverance is less important, for reasons to be mentioned presently. It does the _panegyrics_ admirably.

Footnote 852:

_V. sup._, p. 349. Mérimée commends Taine highly to the _Inconnue_.

Footnote 853:

In English he translated Shakespeare, Macaulay, and Emerson.

Footnote 854:

Especially, some may say, when he does not like you, or what you like.

Footnote 855:

This was probably due to the influence of Taine, with whom (as he once told me in an interesting letter in regard to some published remarks of mine) he at one time took much critical counsel.

Footnote 856:

See the opening piece, “Du Caractère Anglais,” of _Essais sur la Littérature Anglaise_ (Paris, 1883).

Footnote 857:

_Nos Morts Contemporains_, ii. 199 (Paris, 1884).

Footnote 858:

In _Poètes et Artistes de l’Italie_. He was much pleased with the eulogy which I was able to bestow on this. M. Scherer was not—I cannot tell why, for certainly jealousy of praise given to somebody else was not one of his faults. Probably he did not like Boccaccio—or Alaciel.

Footnote 859:

In the book already cited and its companion, _Écrivains Modernes de l’Angleterre_ (Paris, 1885).

Footnote 860:

In the first series of _Nos Morts Contemporains_, but written long before “Théo’s” death, in 1865.

Footnote 861:

_Écrivains Modernes de l’Angleterre_, as above.

Footnote 862:

10 of _Études Critiques sur la Littérature_ (Paris, 1863-89), besides separate ones on Diderot, on Grimm, &c. I myself translated and edited his _Essays on English Literature_ (London, 1891).

Footnote 863:

That is, since the period of the Reformation. I do not think he knew much of older date.

Footnote 864:

It followed, that though less devoted to formulas than Taine, he was determined that all literary criticism must be connected with the exhibition of national character.

Footnote 865:

He _had_ such a sense, both of French wit and of English humour, but within very narrow and sometimes quite arbitrarily drawn restrictions.

Footnote 866:

The best examples of this group are perhaps the _Goethe_, known in England by Mr. Arnold’s essay, the _Taine’s English Literature_, and the treatment of Renan’s _Peuple d’Israël_.

Footnote 867:

Gérard de Nerval ought to have been one of the best of these: but, like Mérimée and Gautier himself, he was much occupied with better things than criticism, and in it he chiefly dealt with drama.

Footnote 868:

_Petit Traité de Poésie Française_: Paris, 1891.

Footnote 869:

Paris, 1867: often reprinted.

Footnote 870:

Paris, 1880, and later (3 vols.)

Footnote 871:

The whole of the 2nd vol., _Curiosités Esthétiques_, and part of the 3rd, _L’Art Romantique_, of his _Œuvres_ (4 vols., Paris, 1868), are occupied by this.

Footnote 872:

One of the few wholly agreeable pieces of anecdotage contained in the _Journal des Goncourt_ seems to show that the accusations generally brought as to the poet having hastened his own end by reckless living were at least hasty. It seems that his mother, Madame Aupick, the most respectable of old ladies, died under the same curse of aphasia and general paralysis.

Footnote 873:

It would be difficult to say quite the same of the _Œuvres Posthumes_ (Paris, 1887), though these also contain valuable critical matter. But much is familiar letter-writing never intended for serious perusal, and not a little bears the clear marks of brain-disease.

Footnote 874:

4 vols., Paris, 1861.

Footnote 875:

The first volume—to George Sand, with Maupassant’s Introduction— appeared in 1884: the general Correspondence followed. George Sand’s replies, as well as other things of hers, give her a right to, at least, a place in this note.

Footnote 876:

_V. inf._ on Mr Pater.

Footnote 877:

Two such different persons and writers as Zola himself and M. Anatole France have, in different parts of the _Mémoires des Goncourt_, given true and valuable testimony to one of the great merits of that much-abused and certainly much-_abusable_ thing journalism—the facility and audacity, namely, which it confers. No doubt the facility which it gives may turn to slovenliness, and the boldness in attempting great tasks to levity: but this need not be so,—M. France himself is a convincing evidence in the one case at least. And there is no doubt that the practised habit of undertaking complicated things at short notice, and of doing the “day’s darg” in the day, protects a man from that “impossibility of getting ready,” that “not knowing how to begin” (and still less how to finish), which has sterilised even genius so frequently.

Footnote 878:

The title of the first, _Mes Haines_ (Paris, 1866), is unlucky. Taken as a joke, it is not very good: taken seriously, it is fatal. It may not be easy to preserve the critical attitude when you love: that attitude is gone, without hope of recovery, as soon as you hate.

Footnote 879:

Paris, 1880.

Footnote 880:

All these will be found in the volume cited.

Footnote 881:

_Op. cit._, p. 343.

Footnote 882:

Again the enemy “has said it.” You cannot have a much better description of the highest literary art than this.

Footnote 883:

He was drowned while bathing. _V._ _Mémoires des Goncourt_.

Footnote 884:

_La Critique Scientifique_ (Paris, 1888), followed by _Études de Crit. Scient._, in two series (1889 and 1890). I am under the impression that Hennequin owed something—perhaps a good deal—to Mr H. M. Posnett’s _Comparative Literature_ (London, 1886), a book which, for the usual reason, escapes our survey. It may, however, be observed that “Comparative _Literature_” is a very awkward phrase, neither really representing “Littérature _Comparée_” nor really analogous to “Comparative Anatomy.” “Comparative _Study of_ Literature” would be all right: otherwise “Comparative _Criticism_” or “_Rhetoric_” is wanted.

Footnote 885:

_La Critique Scientifique_, p. 29.

Footnote 886:

This appeared in 1895; _Études de Littérature Européenne_ followed three years later, and _La Littérature Comparée_ in 1900. The contributions to Petit de Julleville have been noticed (ii. 528. note).

Footnote 887:

For more on it, and on another kind of it, see below on the late Karl Hillebrand.

Footnote 888:

_V. sup._, p. 97 _sq._

Footnote 889:

A good example of his literary work is _La Fin du 18ième Siècle_ (2 vols., Paris, 1880). He speaks of Diderot as _un essayiste à la façon Anglaise_, which is complimentary—and instructive.

Footnote 890:

_Histoire de la Jeune Allemagne, Littérature Étrangère, Drames et Romans de la Vie Littéraire_, &c.

Footnote 891:

Montégut (_v. sup._, p. 445) thought better of him.

Footnote 892:

_V. sup._, p. 336.

Footnote 893:

The posthumous _Épisodes Littéraires_ (Paris, 1890) contrasts very pleasantly with too many utterances “d’Outre-Tombe.”

Footnote 894:

“Call yourself Voltaire: I promise you some sensations,” was one of his boasts which became famous. It was by no means mere bragging.

Footnote 895:

Paris, 1856 onwards.

Footnote 896:

In an essay originally published in _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for July 1886, and reprinted in _Essays in English Literature_ (3rd. ed., London, 1896).

Footnote 897:

As I am not speaking _enfarinhadomente_ about Wilson’s faults, I may fairly protest against an exaggeration of them. It is surely unlucky of Mr Buxton Forman (_Keats’ Letters_, i. 46, ed. 1900) to talk of _Blackwood’s Magazine_ having “a monopoly of frowsy and unsavoury personal gibes” in “the possession of Christopher North,” when he had himself a few papers earlier cited Hazlitt’s almost Bedlamite Billingsgate against Southey in the _Examiner_.

Footnote 898:

As the 4th vol. of _Essays Critical and Imaginative_ (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1856-57). It follows Wilson’s usual lines of a running study of the poem and those who have written about it. Much of it, as of the essay on the _Agamemnon_ which follows, is occupied by a not uninteresting parallel-collection of translations.

Footnote 899:

_Literature of Europe_, chap. xiv., § 82.

Footnote 900:

It will be found in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, vols. xxxiv., xxxvi., and xxxvii. (Edinburgh, 1833-35).

Footnote 901:

For this is one of the metaphors which (as Théophile Gautier boasted of his own, and as so few others can boast) _se suivent_.

Footnote 902:

Ibid., vols. lvii., lviii. (1849).

Footnote 903:

_Blackwood’s Magazine_, vols. lxv.-lxviii. and lxxii. (1849-52).

Footnote 904:

There is much good as well as bad criticism here; but it is almost inevitable that the goodness should be obscured to too many tastes, and the bad intensified to almost all, by the setting of High Jinks. Yet Wilson, like Shakespeare according to Collier, “could be very serious,” and his defence of Croker against Macaulay is far more valid than has usually been allowed.

Footnote 905:

Essays, i. 387 _sq._

Footnote 906:

Ibid., ii. 109 _sq._

Footnote 907:

Ibid., iii. 386.

Footnote 908:

i. 179.

Footnote 909:

As De Quincey had, for one who was not a novelist, the probably unique honour of four complete editions of his _Works_ in his last years and the generation succeeding his death, it is not easy to refer to him. But the last—Professor Masson’s of 1890—has the merit of methodical arrangement: and its tenth volume contains most of the _purely_ critical things.

Footnote 910:

In _Coleridge and Opium Eating_.

Footnote 911:

As it is very dangerous to write about De Quincey, let me observe that this is a phrase of Mr Thackeray’s about another person, and implies affection and even admiration.

Footnote 912:

In his “biography” of Goethe.

Footnote 913:

Vol. x., ed. cit. Date, 1838-39.

Footnote 914:

As such it will prove interesting to compare him with Nisard or Planche, especially the latter. But the comparison will, I fear, bring out that superiority of French criticism at _this_ time which, denying it at others, I fully admit.

Footnote 915:

The objection of some folk to this useful word may be perhaps accounted for by their spelling it “protrept_r_ic.”

Footnote 916:

This book, which often occurs in catalogues at a very moderate price, may be strongly recommended to intelligent book-buyers. It is pretty to look at, agreeable to handle, and delightful to read. _Janus_, another waif, in which he and Wilson collaborated, is less interesting. (For a fuller treatment of Lockhart, as of others, I may once more refer to my _Essays in Criticism_.)

Footnote 917:

_Works_, 7 vols. (London, 1851-52), ed. Derwent Coleridge; _Poems and Memoir_, 2 vols.; _Essays_, 2; _Northern Worthies_, 3. An eighth, of _Fragments_, was promised; but if it ever appeared, I have not seen it.

Footnote 918:

“The Professor,” it is hardly necessary to say, was an early and lifelong friend and neighbour of Hartley, whom he seems to have regarded with particular affection.

Footnote 919:

It is, perhaps, not officious to subjoin a reminder that we have the curious pleasure of S. T. C.'s notes on Hartley in the _Biographia Borealis_. One of these—an objection to the phrase “prose Shakespeare” for Heywood—is very odd, as apparently showing forgetfulness of the fact that the phrase is not his eldest son’s, but his oldest friend’s.

Footnote 920:

_Miscellanies, Prose and Verse_, by William Maginn, ed. R. W. Montagu. 2 vols., London, 1885.

Footnote 921:

They are scattered all over the _Memoirs of Morgan O’Doherty_, and often form independent items of the _Miscellanies_.

Footnote 922:

It would have been interesting to hear Maginn on the Revised Version “after” the Authorised.

Footnote 923:

Ed. cit., ii. 1-116. Let me guard carefully against being supposed myself to speak disrespectfully of Farmer, whose Essay will be found recently reprinted in Mr Nichol Smith’s collection. Farmer is at least as right against _his_ adversaries as Maginn against him.

Footnote 924:

Ibid., pp. 117-144.

Footnote 925:

In prose from _The Story without a Tail_, and in verse from _The Pewter Quart_ onward.

Footnote 926:

_Life_, p. 309 _sq._, ed. cit.

Footnote 927:

_Life_, p. 343 ed. cit.

Footnote 928:

He was thirty-eight.

Footnote 929:

One of the _in_justices is curious from a man of Scottish blood, though every Englishman would commit it, as I own I should have done till very late in my reviewing life. It is the satire on the comparison of a woman’s eyes to dew on “a bramble,” which of course in England means a _bush_, and in Scotland a _berry_. I wonder whether R. L. S. meant to appease the other poor Robert’s _manes_ when he wrote the phrase “eyes of gold and bramble-dew,” and I should have asked him had Fate permitted.

Footnote 930:

It may seem whimsical: but I doubt whether any one of a really critical _ethos_ would put down, even in his private diary, that a private enemy and a hostile reviewer was “a bad, a very bad man, a scandal to politics and letters.” Criticism herself would, I think, condescend to give any of her favourite children’s ears an Apollonian twitch.

Footnote 931:

Carlyle was an older man than Macaulay, but he began to publish original work later.

Footnote 932:

Any one anxious really to appreciate Carlyle’s _potentia_ as a literary critic may be specially commended to this. It was written, of course, not merely before he developed his own style, but before the freer modern criticism had been largely developed by anybody except apart-dwelling stars like Coleridge. But it brands the author as a great critic _if he chose_. He did not wholly choose: and, later, he refused.

Footnote 933:

London, 1896.

Footnote 934:

Not that all Taylor’s ideas were preposterous. He and others of the Norwich School would make a good excursus. Even the “quotidian and stimulant” theory, of which Carlyle makes such fun, might have a chance with Carlyle’s own “highest aim of a nation.”

Footnote 935:

More especially those on the _Nibelungenlied_ and Early German Poetry generally. These could hardly have been better done.

Footnote 936:

As an out-and-out Scottite _and_ Carlylian, I would respectfully deprecate hasty judgment of this. It is a _crux ansata_, and you may easily get hold of the wrong handle.

Footnote 937:

“O people of Paraguay! how long will you continue idiots?” If a casual half-breed really thus put politics and life in a nut-shell, he was certainly somebody.

Footnote 938:

The different paging of the different editions makes it useless to give exact references. Nor are they wanted; for the “Contents” and Indices of Carlyle’s works are ideal.

Footnote 939:

Had he been reading Vico?

Footnote 940:

Since the text was written, a full collection of his literary criticism with many _anepecdota_, has appeared in Messrs Macmillan’s new edition.

Footnote 941:

Edinburgh, 1899, p. 59.

Footnote 942:

Ibid., note. p. 10.

Footnote 943:

It is all the more remarkable that the writer was “not the first comer.” He was, I believe, William Smith, the author of _Thorndale_ and other books much prized by good judges, a man of great talents, wide reading, and admirable character.

Footnote 944:

My copy is the 2nd ed. Mr W. G. Clark’s preface to the 1st is dated “Ap. 1858,” rather less than a year after Brimley’s death.

Footnote 945:

Cf. Chesterfield’s profound remark to Mme. de Mauconseil, on Christmas Day 1755: _Il me semble que le mal physique attendrit autant que le mal moral endurcit le cœur_.

Footnote 946:

This idol had already had notice to quit. The Essay is of 1855, when it originally appeared in _Cambridge Essays_. Matthew Arnold’s admirable _Preface_ is two years older.

Footnote 947:

The “Wordsworth” is some years earlier than the “Tennyson.” It appeared in _Fraser_ during the summer of 1851.

Footnote 948:

He will reappear in the Appendix devoted to holders of the Oxford Chair of Poetry.

Footnote 949:

In _Friends in Council_.

Footnote 950:

I have slipped from N to O: but it is only next door.

Footnote 951:

London, 1902.

Footnote 952:

_Essays and Reviews_, London, 1876. The other papers—on Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot—are good, but not so good, and show that difficulty of the mid-century critic in “sticking to _literature_,” which is the theme of this chapter.

Footnote 953:

London, 1866.

Footnote 954:

London, 1866.

Footnote 955:

That which amused me most is the employment, with the difference, of the cat-girl simile [_v. sup._, ii. 550]. I am sure I did not take it from him; and if we both took it from somebody else (to adopt the comfortable principles of Miss Teresa M’Whirter at the conclusion of _A Legend of the Rhine_), I do not know who the somebody else was.

Footnote 956:

London, 1852.

Footnote 957:

It is important to notice that he is not _hostile_, he is simply puzzled. The great method, which emerges first in Dryden, and which Sainte-Beuve perfected, of “shaking together” different literary examples, is still dark to him in practice, though, as has been said, he had a glimpse of its theory.

Footnote 958:

Foster’s interest in literature—real, but very strongly coloured and conditioned by his moral and religious preoccupations—may be easily appraised by reading his Essays on “A Man Writing his Own Memoirs” and “The Epithet Romantic” in Bohn’s Library.

Footnote 959:

Fox has the credit of “discovering” Browning, but there were personal reasons here. Much more, of course, were there such in A. H. Hallam’s essay on Tennyson—a rather overrated thing.

Footnote 960:

Rogers is even “mentioned in despatches”—that is, by Sainte-Beuve.

Footnote 961:

See his _Early Essays_ in Bohn’s reprint. The criticism of certain romantic poets of the mid century would make an interesting excursus of the kind which I have indicated as (if it were possible) fit to be included in a fourth volume of this work. Horne’s _New Spirit of the Age_ (1845), though exhibiting all the singular inadequacies, inequalities, and _inorganicisms_ of the author of _Orion_, does not entirely deserve the severe contrast which Thackeray drew between it and its original as given by Hazlitt. Mrs Browning, who took some part in this, has left a substantive critical contribution in _The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets_, in which again the weaknesses of the writer in poetry are interestingly compensated by weaknesses in criticism, but in which again also, and much more, “the critic whom every poet must [or should] contain” sometimes asserts himself not unsuccessfully. W. C. Roscoe, whose verse is at least interesting, and has been thought something more, is critically not negligible. But perhaps the most interesting document which would have to be treated in such an excursus is Sydney Dobell’s _Nature of Poetry_, delivered as a lecture (it must have been something of a choke-pear for the audience) at Edinburgh in 1857. Here the author, though not _nominatim_, directly traverses Matthew Arnold’s doctrine in the great Preface (see next chapter), by maintaining that a perfect poem _will be_ the exhibition of a perfect mind, and, we may suppose, a less perfect but still defensible poem the exhibition of a less perfect mind—which principle, no doubt, is, in any case, the sole possible justification of _Festus_ and of _Balder_. Others (especially Sir Henry Taylor) might be added, but these will probably suffice.

Footnote 962:

The immortality of critical error—the impossibility of quelling the Blatant Beast—to which we have alluded (ii. 554, note) is again illustrated here. One might have thought that Mr Arnold had sufficiently crushed and concluded this fallacy. It has been seen again—in places where it should not have been—in these last few years.

Footnote 963:

This very generous assumption comes, I feel sure, from the blending of Wordsworth (_v. sup._, on him) with Aristotle.

Footnote 964:

Mr Arnold never explicitly retracted this “pyramidal” exaggeration—it was not his way; but nearly the whole of his _French Critic on Goethe_ is a transparent “hedge,” a scarcely ambiguous palinode. For the doctrine itself, see note at end of last chapter.

Footnote 965:

I think Mr Arnold, especially after italicising these words, should really have told us as a WHAT we are to think of the author of Shakespeare’s greatest expressions.

Footnote 966:

_V. sup._, i. 116.

Footnote 967:

Those to the manner born or matriculated in it have generally been kind to him: but then he has given them rather considerable bribes.

Footnote 968:

He has been largely imitated in this, and I cannot help thinking that it is a pity. If a man is definitely and ostensibly “reviewing” another man’s work, he has a perfect right, subject to the laws of good manners, to discuss him _quoad hoc_. But illustrations of general discourses by dragging in living persons seem to be forbidden by those laws as they apply in the literary province.

Footnote 969:

This pearl of eighteenth century minor poetry occurs in the 7th (“The Wallflower”) of its author’s _Fables of Flora_ (Chalmers, xvi. 447). I think Scott’s unequalled combination of memory and taste has used it somewhere as a motto.

Footnote 970:

_Gryll Grange_, chap. xiv. Cf. i. 381 note.

Footnote 971:

Vol. i. p. 380. I might, and perhaps should, have introduced an interesting expression of more moderate opinion from St Basil, the pupil of Libanius, and the fellow-student of Julian. But I am glad that I did not, because I can introduce it here with an reference to the interesting translation published with Plutarch’s _How to Read Poetry_ (_v. sup._, i. 140), by Professor Paculford of the University of Washington (“Yale Studies,” No. xv.: New York, 1932). The Saint allows the study of the purer profane literature as a useful and ornamental _introduction_ to higher things.

Footnote 972:

Not that he is wholly wrong in regard to either: while he does allow some of the almost unbelievable absurdities of Brooke’s eccentric, though far from “unimportant,” purpose-novel. But it is evident—and, indeed, confessed—that he is thinking of the ethical tone and spirit first, midmost, and almost last also.

Footnote 973:

Not, again, that the _Short Studies_ especially can be neglected, even from our point of view.

Footnote 974:

I have purposely taken all these examples from the _Selections_, where they will be easily found.

Footnote 975:

The Essays comprising this, with their sequel and complement _The Inner Life of Art_, appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ (which Lewes edited) at its beginning in 1865, and have been usefully reprinted by Mr T. S. Knowlson (London, n. d.) I may observe that the cheap and useful collection (the “Scott Library”) in which this reprint appears provides a large amount of other valuable critical matter.

Footnote 976:

Chap. iii. p. 47 _sq._, ed. cit.

Footnote 977:

Ibid., p. 113.

Footnote 978:

Excepting (largely) the exceptions already made, and also the huge mass of his unreprinted contributions to newspapers. _The Leader_, under his editorship, was a pioneer of improvement in reviewing.

Footnote 979:

The posthumous _Literary Studies_, and Mr Hutton’s essay (_v._ ed. cit. on next paragraph), are the places for studying him. The study may result, without protest from me, in a high opinion of his criticism.

Footnote 980:

2 vols., London, 1894.

Footnote 981:

I fully expect to be told by some critic that there is no such book, just as I once was told that Browning wrote no such poem as _James Lee_.

Footnote 982:

Printed by Mr Gosse (London, 1896) privately: but I believe it has been included in the complete edition.

Footnote 983:

I have always wondered what made him think that I personally prefer plain to ornate prose. The contrary, if it were of any moment, happens to be the case, though I own I think, as even De Quincey thought, that the ornate styles are not styles of all work.

Footnote 984:

Nor do I think the “Postscript” of _Appreciations_, where the writer “Arnoldises” somewhat, one of his best things, good as it is.

Footnote 985:

Especially in his numerous volumes of Essays and Studies, under various names.

Footnote 986:

London, 1895.

Footnote 987:

A “pair” for Mr Symonds from the other University might be found in the late Mr Frederick Myers, who, with more philosophical and less artistic tendency, exhibited an equally _flamboyant_ style.

Footnote 988:

Its chief monuments or repertories are _Essays and Phantasies_ (London, 1881) and _Poems, Essays, and Fragments_ (London, 1892).

Footnote 989:

On men like Shelley and Blake, of course, Thomson was free from most of his “Satans”: and he speaks well on them.

Footnote 990:

His _Defoe_, in the _English Men of Letters_ Series, is not to be overlooked.

Footnote 991:

_Manual of English Prose Literature_ (Edinburgh, 1872); _Characteristics of English Poets, from Chaucer to Shirley_ (Edinburgh, 1874).

Footnote 992:

I do not know whether he contributed to anything before that remarkable periodical _The Dark Blue_, which, during its short life in the earliest 'Seventies, had a staff not easily surpassable, and almost reminding one of the earlier English _London Magazine_ and of the French _Globe_.

Footnote 993:

Both in the _English Men of Letters_. The _Sterne_ appeared in 1882; the _Coleridge_ in 1884.

Footnote 994:

_The New Fiction and other Essays on Literary Subjects_ (London, 1897).

Footnote 995:

See his _Letters, Lectures, and Reviews_: London, 1873.

Footnote 996:

Especially in _Horæ Sabbaticæ_.

Footnote 997:

London, 1873.

Footnote 998:

London, 1889.

Footnote 999:

London, 1893.

Footnote 1000:

I do not mean that they were rubbish there. Rubbish is only “matter in the wrong place,” and what is rubbish in a book need by no means be rubbish in a newspaper.

Footnote 1001:

London, 1880.

Footnote 1002:

2 vols., London, 1887.

Footnote 1003:

Such as even Gautier.

Footnote 1004:

This sensibleness, no doubt, ought always to characterise the “Tertium Quid” or “cross-bench” mind. It is equally indubitable that it most commonly does not.

Footnote 1005:

_T. Q._, vol. ii.

Footnote 1006:

I do not take special notice of R. L. Stevenson here, because his criticism, in any formal shape, belongs mainly to the earlier and tentative stage of his work, and never, to my fancy, had much fixity or grip, interesting and stimulating as it is. I ventured to tell him, when I met him first, after the appearance of _The New Arabian Nights_ in _London_, that _here_ was Apollo waiting for him, not there: and I hold to the view. Others, such as Mr Henley (with whom also I rowed in that galley—a tight and saucy one, if not exactly a _galère capitaine_), Mr Robert Buchanan, Sir Leslie Stephen, Prof. Bain, have passed away too recently; and yet others must fall into the _numerus_.

Footnote 1007:

Bk. VIII.

Footnote 1008:

In accordance with the absolute frankness which I have imposed upon myself, I shall confess here that my knowledge of the most modern German literature is much less complete than my knowledge of French and English.

Footnote 1009:

I use the Cotta ed., in 13 vols.

Footnote 1010:

The passage in the opening of the _Reisebilder_ ought to be sufficiently well known.

Footnote 1011:

Ed. cit., vii. 172 and 215.

Footnote 1012:

_Vermischte Schriften_, xii. 175

Footnote 1013:

x. 225.

Footnote 1014:

They should specially not read him on Börne.

Footnote 1015:

Vol. iv., ed. cit.

Footnote 1016:

The chief are at iv. 230 and x. 250.

Footnote 1017:

Especially vii. 185 _sq._

Footnote 1018:

vii. 239 _sq._

Footnote 1019:

x. 216.

Footnote 1020:

An excellent subject for one of those D.Litt. theses by which we are at last going to put ourselves on the level of Germany (to the satisfaction of persons who write about Education) would be “The _Reisebilder_ considered as an Allegory of Criticism, with some remarks on their excursions into Category.”

Footnote 1021:

Ed. Cotta. I have not yet worked with the newer, and it is said better, ed. of Reclam.

Footnote 1022:

Vols. 8-11 of the Cotta ed. It is from these that the material of _Schopenhauer’s Art of Literature_, translated by Mr Bailey Saunders (London, 1891), is taken. The excellence of Mr Saunders’s version is a matter of common consent. I am not quite so certain about his reconstitution of contexts, which is sometimes rather too much on a par with the taxidermic exploits of the late Mr Waterton; and he has left out some piquant things. But the advantage of opening such precious matter to merely English readers not only excuses this but makes excuse unnecessary.

Footnote 1023:

Has any other German ever written quite such good prose as Schopenhauer’s?

Footnote 1024:

_P. und P._, § 320, ed. cit., xi. 251.

Footnote 1025:

In chap. xxiii. of _P. und P._, “Über Schriftstellerei und Stil.” Mr. Bailey Saunders isolates the Style part.

Footnote 1026:

_P. und P._, § 384; _Art. of. Lit._, p. 6.

Footnote 1027:

See chap. xxii. _Selbstdenken_. Schopenhauer’s maxim, “Reading is a mere _succedaneum_ (“Surrogat”) for thinking oneself,” at once shows what he means, and invites the reply, “Yes: but a man who knows how to read always makes his reading the seed of his thought.”

Footnote 1028:

§ 287. _Art. of Lit._, p. 11.

Footnote 1029:

§ 244. _Art. of Lit._ composes its section “on Criticism” of part of this context and another. The whole of the original chapter xx., “Über Urtheil, Kritik, Beifall und Ruhren,” is important, though the writer’s own soreness betrays itself, as usual, rather too much.

Footnote 1030:

For the origin of the section thus headed in _Art. of Lit._, see back to chap. iii. of this part of _P. und P._

Footnote 1031:

Book III. and App.

Footnote 1032:

§ 39.

Footnote 1033:

App. on Poetry.

Footnote 1034:

§ 51.

Footnote 1035:

_V. sup._, ii. 86.

Footnote 1036:

One could develop, with special relevance, the philosopher’s peremptory limitation of the attractive season of womankind to the time between the ages of eighteen and eight-and-twenty: and his positive anathema on the _retroussé_ nose. It is astonishing how this feature disturbs critics! Cf. Lessing, Alison, Carrière, &c.

Footnote 1037:

Ed. Cotta, Works, vols. xv.-xviii. The two vols. of _Letters_ and _Pocketbooks_, with which this edition has been reinforced since I wrote the text, add very much to our knowledge of Grillparzer’s personality, and something to that of his critical position: but need change nothing in the estimate above given.

Footnote 1038:

Vol. xv.

Footnote 1039:

xv. 24. The “peace” of Boccaccio and the “peace” of Dante combined!

Footnote 1040:

Ibid.

Footnote 1041:

xv. 27.

Footnote 1042:

xv. 35-45.

Footnote 1043:

P. 40.

Footnote 1044:

P. 49.

Footnote 1045:

P. 58.

Footnote 1046:

P. 62, and elsewhere.

Footnote 1047:

xv. 163. “Die Betrachtung tödtet, weil sie die Personlichkeit aufhebt: die Bemerkung erfrischt, denn sie erregt und unterstützt die Thätigkeit.” “Consideration” and “Observation” come nearest: but they are not fully adequate.

Footnote 1048:

P. 176.

Footnote 1049:

Filling the other three vols.

Footnote 1050:

xvi. 158.

Footnote 1051:

xviii. 97, 98. There is, not a judgment, but a curious mixture of compliment and fling on him, at p. 130, on which _v. inf._

Footnote 1052:

xvi. 175.

Footnote 1053:

xvi. 185.

Footnote 1054:

xviii. 41.

Footnote 1055:

xviii. 47-74.

Footnote 1056:

xviii. 36. Grillparzer evidently did not care much for “woodnotes.”

Footnote 1057:

See xviii. 12-24, and other places in the index of that volume.

Footnote 1058:

See Scherer’s _History of German Literature_ under this name. Grillparzer himself, at Schreyvogel’s death, regrets (xviii. 130) the loss of his literary opinion, and says that there is no one left in Germany with whom he could talk in the same way “except perhaps Heine, if he were not intrinsically a scurvy _patronus_.”

Footnote 1059:

Mr Bosanquet.

Footnote 1060:

2 vols., Leipzig, 1859. Its constant and ingenious _illustration_, and the substantive importance given to Poetic, are its claims to admission here.

Footnote 1061:

Of course they have their merits, and have had their uses. In material criticism often; in textual criticism sometimes; in merely _dramatic_ criticism not seldom, they are useful to those who want these things. But then, as Mr Locker’s immortal friend at the “Travellers” said about the company next door, “One _doesn’t_ want them, you know,” or, rather, one wants something else and something more.

Footnote 1062:

I use the Leipsic ed., 5 vols., 1871-74.

Footnote 1063:

v. 37.

Footnote 1064:

_Shakespeare-studien_: Stuttgart, 1866. One of M. Scherer’s best short criticisms is devoted to this book (_Études_, vol. vi., translated by the present writer in _Essays on English Literature_, by E. Scherer: London, 1891). But the original deserves reading. It is not much against it that the author relied on forgeries to some extent. The religion of “the document” almost necessarily passes into the superstition of the forgery.

Footnote 1065:

Vol. xiv. of his _Works_ (Leipzig, 1887). The Preface is dated 1863.

Footnote 1066:

7 vols., Berlin, 1874-85. There is a newer edition, I believe. As long ago as 1868 he had published, in French and at Paris, a volume of _Études Historiques et Littéraires_, and he did much else.

Footnote 1067:

His Works are now obtainable in several forms, there being two _complete_ editions (Leipzig, n. d.), which give all the work published during his lifetime, in 8 vols., and a still lengthening tail of _Remains_ (7 vols. up to 1904), and several others of separate works. Writing on him has been exceedingly copious, “he has become a name”: but there is probably no sounder and fairer contribution to the _Um-Nietzschung_ of Nietzsche, from a portent into an intelligible phenomenon, than Professor Pringle-Pattison’s Essay in the 2nd ed. of _Man’s Place in the Cosmos_ (Edinburgh, 1902).

Footnote 1068:

_Der Fall Wagner_, p. 36 and elsewhere.

Footnote 1069:

I was pleased, in reading Nietzsche, after I had written the section above on Grillparzer, and when I had already assigned Hillebrand’s place here, to find him frequently quoting the Austrian dramatist with respect, and definitely selecting the other as the representative German critic of his time.

Footnote 1070:

_V. inf._ The two books which preceded this, _Menschliches Allzumenschliches_ and _Morgenröthe_, are also almost purely ethical, though the extensive handling of moral philosophers in the past is necessarily literary too.

Footnote 1071:

It would be improper to dwell on this point here. I hope to do more justice to Nietzsche’s purely literary side elsewhere.

Footnote 1072:

This word has been objected to by precisians. But it has the authority of Thackeray: and if it had none, it is exactly the word wanted for a certain flagrant quality of the latest nineteenth century, and more especially for the _ethos_ of Nietzsche. With all his originality in form, he is simply parasitic in fact. He can only deny and pervert and “topsyturvify” the established and accepted. The _Uebermensch_ himself is much more an “_Un_mensch,” who is not to be God but an un-God. And the philosopher’s famous syllogism, “There cannot be a God, or why am _I_ not one if there is?” amounts simply to a turning topsyturvy of the much sounder and in fact unanswerable argument, “There must be a God; for _I_ am not one.”

Footnote 1073:

Even later his alleged doctrine of “Recurrence”—not his most repugnant to poetry, or philosophy, or religion itself—was only an echo of the carpenter in _Peter Simple_!

Footnote 1074:

_Beleidigende Klarheit._

Footnote 1075:

_Ein Geist der entnervt._

Footnote 1076:

He somewhere speaks of Stendhal and Dostoieffsky as his “two great discoveries.” A curious fling by implication at Baudelaire means, I think, only that Baudelaire had the impudence to admire Wagner.

Footnote 1077:

_Falschmünzler._

Footnote 1078:

16th ed., pp. x, 756 (Città di Castello, 1902).

Footnote 1079:

One famous person may be noted exceptionally. A critic who held political and other views contrary to Mazzini’s, and who thought (as too many critics have apparently thought) that it is lawful to wreak vengeance in the literary sphere for sins committed elsewhere, would have a considerable opportunity with Mazzini himself, as a critic. He has written not a little apparently of the kind, and about very important persons—Dante, Goethe, Byron, Mr Carlyle, papers on all of whom will be found in Mr William Clarke’s useful English edition of Mazzini’s selected Essays (London, n.d.) He has said things for which, if one were a Veuillot, one could, in Veuillot’s own phrase, “promise him sensations.” But this is not _our_ way. One soon sees (in fact, I think, he frankly confesses it in more than one place) that the writer is not thinking of these great writers as writers at all, nor of their books as books. He is thinking of their relation, actual or by ingenuity representable, towards his idol of “Collective Humanity,” and he is talking, as he is thinking, of nothing else. We have nothing here to do with Collective Humanity, but much with the Humanities, which are different: and so he escapes our jurisdiction. Perhaps a good many more modern Italians would do the same, that influence of Vico, which we noted in Signor Croce, being very strong in them.

Footnote 1080:

_Saggi Critici_, _v. inf._

Footnote 1081:

Naples (2nd ed.), 1869.

Footnote 1082:

Naples, 1872.

Footnote 1083:

Sismondi—French-writing, Swiss-born, Italian by origin—may seem to claim admission, if only for his _Littérature du Midi_: but I think not.

Footnote 1084:

3 vols., Bâle, 1829-30.

Footnote 1085:

2 vols., Paris, 1851.

Footnote 1086:

2nd ed., 3 vols., Paris, 1857.

Footnote 1087:

A very large part (about two-thirds) of the 1st volume is occupied by Chateaubriand.

Footnote 1088:

Lamartine (with whom Vinet is, of course, more _comfortable_) and Hugo have about three-fourths of the 2nd vol. between them. In this and the 3rd, Béranger, Delavigne, Sainte-Beuve, Quinet, Michelet, and many others, figure.

Footnote 1089:

ii. 387-412.

Footnote 1090:

It is fair to say that much of his work, being posthumously published, _is_ lecture, and might, if he had lived, have been worked up by him into a better form.

Footnote 1091:

In the article on Saint-Marc Girardin, which concludes the third volume.

Footnote 1092:

8th ed., 2 vols., Geneva, 1901.

Footnote 1093:

Nor can I recognise his description of Amiel’s treatment of a literary subject at p. xix of the Introduction—“Il l’embrasse, mais au dehors.” Alas! the Lucretian _nequicquam_ comes in here again: but I should say that few men’s critical embraces were more intimate than Amiel’s, brief as they are.

Footnote 1094:

i. 12.

Footnote 1095:

i. 17.

Footnote 1096:

i. 69.

Footnote 1097:

i. 129.

Footnote 1098:

The _entrefilet_ of the 7th of November 1862 on _la critique indifférente_, though it quite certainly is not meant wholly or even mainly for literary criticism, should not be missed.

Footnote 1099:

i. 167, April 24, 1862; and i. 176-183, January 8 and 13, April 8, 1863.

Footnote 1100:

i. 194; ii. 219.

Footnote 1101:

i. 229.

Footnote 1102:

ii. 110.

Footnote 1103:

On German “vulgarity,” p. 112 (with which an acute passage on Goethe at p. 120 should be compared); on the two poetesses, Louisa Siefert and Mme. Ackermann (141 and 174); a valiant promulgation of the truth that most fear to speak, “There is no Progress” (167); notes on M. Coppée (200); Hugo again (228); La Fontaine (232); Laprade (280); Stendhal (286).

Footnote 1104:

It does not seem necessary to follow the lines of the earlier Interchapters by summarising distributively the critical results of the period in different countries and phases. The very indefiniteness of the whole establishes a community which can be generally pointed out.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I.

THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.

THE HOLDERS—EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MINORS—LOWTH— HURDIS—THE RALLY: COPLESTON—CONYBEARE— MILMAN—KEBLE—THE ‘OCCASIONAL [ENGLISH] PAPERS’— THE ‘PRÆLECTIONS’—GARBETT—CLAUGHTON— DOYLE—SHAIRP—PALGRAVE— “SALUTANTUR VIVI.”

(_I have thought this sketch worth giving, partly as an example of the kind of excursus which might be appended, perhaps not without some advantage, and certainly in some numbers, to this History. But I give it also because it illustrates—in a manner which cannot be elsewhere paralleled at all in our own country, and to which I know no Continental parallel—by a continuous and unbroken chain of instances and applications, the course of European as well as English theory, practice, and taste in Criticism, from a period when the Neo-classic creed was still in at least apparently fullest flourishing, through nearly two whole centuries, to what, in the eye of history, is the present moment. The enforced vacation of the Chair after a single decade at most, and its filling by popular election, and not by the choice of an individual or a board, add to its representative character: and the usual publication of at least some of the results, in each case, makes that character almost uniquely discoverable in its continuity, while even the change of vehicles from Latin to English is not without its importance. There is no room here—and it would perhaps be unnecessary in any case—to anticipate the easy labour of summarising its lessons. But I think they may be said to emphasise the warning—frequently given or hinted already—that the result of the altered conditions and laws of criticism is not clear gain. No part of Mr Arnold’s best critical work was, I think, done for the Chair; and I should myself be inclined to select, as the best work actually done for it, that of Keble, who represents the combination of the old Classical-Preceptist tradition, with something of the new comparison and free expatiation, as well as very much of the purely appreciative tendency._)

[Sidenote: _The holders._]

This Chair—founded by Henry Birkhead, D.C.L., a Trinity man, a Fellow of All Souls, and a member of the Inner Temple—began its operations in 1708, the conditions of its tenure (which have only recently been altered) providing for a first holding of five years, a single renewal for the same period, and a sort of rotation, in the sense that the same college could not supply two successive occupants. The actual incumbents have been: 1708-18, Trapp; 1718-28, Thomas Warton the elder; 1728-38, Spence; 1738-41, John Whitf(i)eld; 1741-51 (the most distinguished name as yet), Lowth; 1751-56, William Hawkins; 1756-66, Thomas Warton the younger; 1766-76, Benjamin Wheeler; 1776-83, Randolph; 1783-93, Holmes; 1793 to 1802, Hurdis. With the nineteenth century a brighter order begins, all but one or two of the Professors having made their mark out of the Chair as well as in it. They were: Copleston, 1802-12; Conybeare, 1812-21; Milman, 1821-31; Keble, 1831-42; Garbett (the dark star of this group, but, as we shall see, not quite lightless), 1842-52; Claughton, 1852-57; Matthew Arnold, 1857-67; Sir Francis Doyle, 1867-77; Principal Shairp, 1877-87; Mr Palgrave, 1887-95; while of living occupants Mr Courthope resigned the Chair after a single tenure; and Mr Bradley was elected to it under a statutory limitation to this term.

[Sidenote: _Eighteenth century minors._]

Of these, Trapp, Spence, the younger Warton, and Arnold have received notice in the text, which would have been theirs had they never held the Chair. The lucubrations of the first held for some time an honourable place as an accepted handbook on the subject. Spence, profiting by the almost Elysian tolerance of his sensible century, and finding that neither residence nor lecturing was insisted on, seems to have resided very little, and to have lectured hardly or not at all. Tom Warton the younger, whose _History_ would have dignified any _cathedra_, appears to have devoted himself during his actual tenure entirely to the classics, and never to have published any of his lectures except one on Theocritus. His father, in the interval between the respectable labours of Trapp and the philosophical silence of Spence, had earned no golden opinions, and though the repeated attacks of Amherst in _Terræ Filius_ may have been due partly to political rancour, and partly to that ingenious and unlucky person’s incorrigible Ishmaelitism, it seems to have been admitted that the Professor’s understanding and erudition lay very open to criticism, and that his elocution and manner were not such as could shield them. Of Whitfield, Hawkins, Wheeler, Randolph, and Holmes, what I have been able to gather may best be set in a note.[1105] The first person to make any real figure in and for the Chair was the author of _De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum_, which at once attained not merely an English but a European reputation.

[Sidenote: _Lowth._]

To discuss the Hebrew scholarship of this famous book (which was first published in 1753, and repeatedly reprinted, revised, translated, attacked, defended) would be wholly out of place here, even if the writer had not almost wholly forgotten the little Hebrew he learnt at school. It is still, I believe—even by specialists with no general knowledge of literature—admitted to have been epoch-making in its insistence on the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. But to those who take the historical view of literature and of criticism its place is secure quite apart from this. Not merely in the Renaissance, but in the Middle and even the Dark Ages, the matter of the Bible had been used to parallel and illustrate rhetorical and literary doctrines and rules. But Lowth was almost the first to treat its poetical forms from something like the standpoint of sound comparative literary criticism.[1106] Now this, as the whole tenor of our book has gone to contend, was the chief and principal thing that had to be done. If we have any advantage over the men of old, it is that we (or some of us) have at last mastered the fact that one literature or one language cannot _prescribe_ anything to another, but that it may _teach_ much. And this new instance of a literature—unique in special claims to reverence, unique likewise in the fact that in its best examples it could owe nothing to those Greeks and Romans who have so beneficently but so tyrannously influenced all the modern tongues—was invaluable in its quality and almost incalculable in its moment. That Lowth’s exposition resulted directly or indirectly in not a little maladroit _imitation_ of Hebrew poetry was not his fault; his critical lesson was wholly good.

[Sidenote: _Hurdis._]

Hurdis, a person now very much forgotten, had his day of interest and of something like position. He is not unfrequently quoted by writers, especially by Southey, of the great period of 1800-1830, which he a little preceded, and he has the honour—rare for so recent a writer—of a whole article[1107] on his poems in the _Retrospective Review_. As a poet he was mainly an imitator of his friend Cowper—a fact which, with the title of his chief work, _The Village Curate_, will give intending or declining readers a sufficiently exact idea of what they are undertaking or relinquishing. Easy blank verse, abundant and often not infelicitous description, and unexceptionable though slightly copybook sentiments,[1108] form his poetic or versifying staple. As a critic I regret to find that my note on him is “Chatter”: and I do not know anything of his that makes me, on reflection, think this unjust.

[Sidenote: _The rally: Copleston._]

I should be half afraid that the interest which I feel in the next set of Prælections, those of Edward Copleston,—“_the_ Provost,” as he anticipated Hawkins in being to Oxford men, even not of his own college of Oriel,—might be set down to that _boulimia_ or morbid appetite for critical writings of which I have been accused, if I had not at hand a very potent compurgator. Keble, it is true, was a personal friend of Copleston’s. But he was not at all the man to let personal friendship, any more than personal enmity, bias his judgment; and he was admirably qualified to judge. Yet he says deliberately[1109] that the book “is by far the most distinct, and the richest in matter, of any which it has fallen to our lot to read on the subject.” I cannot myself go quite so far as that, and I doubt whether Keble himself would have gone so far when, twenty years later, he wrote his own exquisite Lectures; but I can go a long way towards it.

The future Provost and Bishop has, indeed, other critical proofs on which to rely,[1110]—the famous and excellent “Advice to a Young Reviewer,” which I fear is just as much needed, and just as little heeded, as it was a hundred years ago, the admirable smashing of the _Edinburgh’s_ attack on Oxford, and other matters,—but the _Prælections_[1111] are the chief and principal thing. Keble insisted that they ought to be Englished, but I am not so sure. They form one of the _severest_ critical treatises with which I am acquainted; and some of the features of this severity would, I think, appear positively uninviting in English dress, while they consistently and perfectly suit the toga and the sandal. But I must explain a little more fully in what this “severity” consists; for the word is ambiguous. I do not mean that Copleston rejects Pleasure as the end of Poetry; for, on the contrary, he writes _Delectare_ boldly on his shield, and omits _prodesse_ save as an indirect consequence. I do not mean that he is a very Draconic critic of particulars, though he can speak his mind trenchantly enough.[1112] Nor do I mean that he is a very abstract writer; for every page is strewn with concrete illustrations, very well selected, and, for the most part, un-hackneyed.

His severity is rather of the ascetic and “methodist” kind; he resembles nothing so much as a preceptist of the school of Hermogenes, who should have discarded triviality, and risen to very nearly the weight and substance of Aristotle. At the very beginning he makes a statute for himself, to cite no literature but Greek and Latin, and to use no language but these. And he never breaks either rule; for though, on rare occasions, he refers to English writers— Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Burke, Reynolds[1113]—it is a reference only to books, or poems, or passages, never a citation. And in the second place his method is throughout—constant as is his use of the actual poetic object-lesson—to proceed by general categories, not of poetic kinds (he shuns that ancient and now well-beaconed quicksand[1114]) but of qualities, constituents, means. His whole book, after a brief definition or apology for not defining, is distributed under four parts,—Of Imitation, Of the Emotions, Of Imagination (Phantasia), and Of Judgment,—though he never reached the fourth,[1115] owing to his tenure of the Chair coming to an end. After a pretty full discussion of the nature and subject of Imitation, he makes his link with his next subject by dwelling on the _Imitatio morum_, and so of the Passions themselves. In this part a very large share is given to the subject of _Sententiæ_— “sentiments,” as Keble translates it, though, as I have pointed out formerly,[1116] no single translation of the word is at all satisfactory. The section on Imagination is very interesting. Copleston is at a sort of middle stage between the restricted Addisonian and the wide Philostratean-Shakespearean-Coleridgean interpretation of the word. He expressly admits that other senses besides sight can supply the material of _Phantasia_; but his examples are mainly drawn from material which _is_ furnished by the sight, and his inclusions of Allegory, Mythology, &c., with other things, sometimes smack of an insufficient discrimination between Imagination and Fancy. Indeed the fact that he is Præ-Coleridgean helps to give him his interest.

Keble mildly complains that Copleston does not make use of that doctrine of Association which he himself, writing so early, had perhaps adopted, not from Coleridge but direct from Hartley. We have, in our day, seen this doctrine worked to death and sent to the knacker’s in philosophy generally; but there is no doubt that it can never be neglected in poetry, being, perhaps, the most universal (though by no means _the_ universal) means of approach to the sources of the poetic pleasure. It does not, however, seem to me that Copleston intended to mount so high, or go so far back: his aim was, I think, more rhetorical, according to a special fashion, than metacritical. But his mediate axioms are numerous and often very informing: and his illustrations, as has been said, abundant, really illustrative, and singularly recreative. He lays most Latin and many Greek poets under contribution; but some of his most effective examples are drawn from a poet whom he does not critically overvalue, but who has no doubt been, as a rule, critically undervalued, and for whom he himself evidently had a discriminating affection—that is to say, Claudian.

On the whole, the appearance of a book of this scope and scheme, at the very junction of the centuries and the ’isms, Classic and Romantic, is of singular interest. Until intelligent study of the Higher Rhetoric— reformed, adjusted, and extended—has been reintroduced, such another will not come. But such another might come with very great advantage, and would supply a very important _tertium quid_ to the mere Æsthetics and to the sheer Impressionism between which Criticism has too often divided itself.

[Sidenote: _Conybeare._]

There is almost as much significance in Copleston’s successor, though it is a significance of a different kind. For J. J. Conybeare was the first Professor of Poetry to bestow attention on Anglo-Saxon (Warton, even in his _History_, had not gone, with any knowledge, beyond Middle English), and so to complete the survey of all English Literature. Before his appointment he had held, as its first occupant, the chair of Anglo-Saxon itself; and while Professor of Poetry he was a country parson. He died suddenly and comparatively young, and his remarkable _Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry_[1117] were published after his death by his brother, who is actually responsible for a good part of its matter, so that the book is a composite one. It is thus mainly in its general significance— for Conybeare’s Prælections as Professor were not, so far as I know, published—that it is valuable for us. But the value thus given is unmistakable. Conybeare’s individual judgments and _aperçus_ are always interesting, and often acute; but his real importance lies in the fact that he was almost the first—though Mitford, after Ellis, had attempted the thing as an outsider—to move back the focussing-point sufficiently to get _all_ English Literature under view. Nothing could serve more effectually to break up the false standing-ground of the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: _Milman._]

A curious but perhaps not surprising thing about Milman’s Professorship is that it aroused the ire of an undergraduate poet of the rarest though of the most eccentric type—namely, Beddoes. If Milman really did “denounce” _Death’s Jest-Book_,[1118] it is a pity that his lectures were (so far as I know) never printed, or at least collected, for there might have been more such things of the fatally interesting kind which establishes the rule that Professors should not deal, in their lectures, with contemporary literature. It was certainly unlucky for a man to begin by objecting in one official capacity to _Death’s Jest-Book_, and to end by objecting in another to Stevens’s Wellington Monument. And that Milman had generally the character of a harsh and donnish critic is obvious, from Byron’s well-known suggestion of him as a possible candidate for the authorship of the _Quarterly_ article on Keats, though the rhyme of “kill man” may have had something to do with this. If he wrote much literary criticism we have little of it in the volume of _Essays_ which his son published, after his death, in 1870. Even on Erasmus—surely a tempting subject—he manages to be as little literary as is possible, and rather less than one might have thought to be; and his much better-known _Histories_ are not more so.

[Sidenote: _Keble._]

Ignorance may sneer, but Knowledge will not even smile, at the dictum that not the least critical genius that ever adorned the Oxford Chair was possessed by John Keble. There is some faint excuse for Ignorance. The actual _Prælections_[1119] of the author of _The Christian Year_, being Latin, are not read: his chief English critical works,[1120] though collected not so very long ago, were collected too late to catch that flood-tide, in their own sense, which is unfortunately, as a rule, needed to land critical works out of reach of the ordinary ebb. Moreover, there is no question but Keble requires “allowance”; and the allowance which he requires is too often of the kind least freely granted in the present day. If we have anywhere (I hope we have) a man as holy as Keble, and as learned, and as acute, he will hardly express the horror at Scott’s occasional use of strong language which Keble expresses.[1121] Our historic sense, and our illegitimate advantage of perspective, have at least taught us that to quarrel with Scott again, for not being “Catholic” enough, is almost to quarrel with Moses for not having actually led the children of Israel into Palestine. And no man, as honest as Keble was, would now echo that other accusation against the great magician (whom, remember, Keble almost adored, and of whom he thought far more highly as a poet than many good men do now) of tolerating intemperance; though some might feign it to suit a popular cant.

But in all these respects it is perfectly easy for those who have once schooled themselves to this apparently but not really difficult matter, to make the necessary allowance.[1122] And then, even in the English critical Essays—the “Scott,” the “Sacred Poetry,” the “Unpublished Letters of Warburton,” and the “Copleston”—_verus incessu patet criticus_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Occasional [_English_] Papers.]

His general attitude to poetic criticism (he meddled little with any other) is extremely interesting. His classical training impelled him towards the “subject” theory, and the fact that his two great idols in modern English poetry were Scott and Wordsworth was not likely to hold him back. He has even drifted towards a weir, pretty clearly, one would think, marked “Danger!” by asking whether readers do not feel the attraction of Scott’s novels to be as great as, and practically identical with, that of his poems. But no “classic” could possibly have framed the definition of poetry which he puts at the outset[1123] of the Scott Essay as “The indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.” Everybody will see what this owes to Wordsworth; everybody should see how it is glossed and amplified—in a non-Wordsworthian or an extra-Wordsworthian sense. We meet the pure critical Keble again, in his enthusiastic adoption of Copleston’s preference for “Delight” (putting Instruction politely in the pocket) as the poetic criterion.[1124] And his defence of Sacred Poetry, however interested it may seem to be, coming from him, is one of the capital essays of English criticism. He makes mince-meat of Johnson, and he takes by anticipation a good deal of the brilliancy out of his brilliant successor, Mr Arnold, on this subject. The passage, short but substantial,[1125] on Spenser in this is one of the very best to be found on that critic of critics (as by an easily intelligible play he might be said to be) as well as poet of poets. Spenser always finds out a bad critic—he tries good ones at their highest.

[Sidenote: _The_ Prælections.]

Still the _Prælections_ themselves must, of course, always be Keble’s own touchstone, or rather his ground and matter of assay. And he comes out well. The dedication (a model of stately enthusiasm) to Wordsworth as _non solum dulcissimæ poeseos verum etiam divinæ veritatis antistes_, strikes the keynote of the whole. But it may be surprising to some to find how “broad” Keble is, in spite of his inflexible morality and his uncompromising churchmanship. He was kept right partly, no doubt, by holding fast as a matter of theory to the “Delight” test—pure and virtuous delight, of course, but still delight, first of all and most of all. But mere theory would have availed him little without the poetic spirit, which everywhere in him translates itself into the critical, and almost as little without the wide and (whether deliberately so or not) comparative reading of ancient and modern verse which he displays. His general definition of Poetry here is slightly different from that given above, as was indeed required by his subject and object. He presents it— at once refining and enlarging upon part of the Aristotelian one of Tragedy, and neutralising the _vinum dæmonum_ notion at once,—as _subsidium benigni numinis_, the medicinal aid given by God to subdue, soften, and sanctify Passion. But his working out—necessarily, in its main lines, obvious but interesting to contrast with his successor Mr Arnold’s undogmatised and secularised application of the same idea[1126]—is less interesting to us in itself than the _aperçus_ on different poets, ancient and modern, to which it gives rise. Few pages deserve to be skipped by the student: even technical discussion of the _tenuis et arguta_ kind, as he modestly calls it, becomes alive under his hand on such subjects as the connection of Poetry and Irony (_Præl._ v.) But there is a still higher interest in such things as the contrast, in the same Prælection, of the undeviating self-consistency of Spenser in all his work, the bewildering apparent lack of central unity in Shakespeare with its resolution, and the actual inconsistency of Dryden. All the Homeric studies deserve reading, the discussion of the _Odyssey_ in _Præl._ xi. being especially noteworthy, with its culmination in that delightful phrase about Nausicaa which we quoted in the last volume.[1127] Particularly wise and particularly interesting is the treatment of “Imitation” (the lower imitation) in _Præl._ xvi., where those who are of our mystery will not fail to compare the passage with Vida. How comfortable is it to find a poet-critic, so uncompromising on dignity of subject, who can yet admit, and that with not the faintest grudging, that it “is incredible how mightily the hidden fire is roused by single words or clauses—nay, by the sound of mere syllables, that strike the ear at a happy nick of time.”[1128] This is almost “the doctrine of the Poetic Moment” itself, though we must not urge it too far, and though it is brought in apropos of the suggestiveness _to poets_ of antecedent poetic work. It is still sovereign against a still prevailing heresy. The abundant treatment of Æschylus[1129] is also to be carefully noted; for, as we have observed, that mighty poet had been almost neglected during the Neo-classic period.

The second score of Lectures is still technically devoted to the ancients, especially Pindar, the second and third Tragedians, Theocritus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace; but references to the moderns, not very rare in the first volume, become still more frequent here, and are sometimes, as those to Spenser and Bunyan in the matter of allegory,[1130] and the contrast of Jason and Macduff as bewailing their children,[1131] very notable. On his narrower subject, the judgment of Sophocles in _Præl._ xxviii. is singularly weighty; and I should like to have heard Mr Matthew Arnold answer on behalf of his favourite. The comparative tameness, and the want of variety and range, which some (not all, of course) feel in the “singer and child of sweet Colonos” are here put with authority by one whom no one could accuse of _Sturm und Drang_ preferences, or of an undisciplined thirst for novelty. Only on Theocritus, perhaps, does Morality sit _in banco_ with Taste to a rather disastrous effect, and the fact is curiously explicable. His disapproval of Scott’s strong language, and his want of ecclesiastical-mindedness, and his lenity to liquor, had not blinded Keble in the least to Scott’s poetry; he had admitted the charitable and comfortable old plea of “time, not man,” in favour of certain peccadilloes of Shakespeare; he is, in fact, nowhere squeamish to silliness. But he cannot pardon Theocritus for the _Oaristys_ and such things, simply because the new Wordsworthian nature-worship in him is wounded and shocked _insanabiliter_. “Like Aristophanes,” he says, “like Catullus, like Horace, Theocritus betakes himself to the streams and the woods, not to seek rest for a weary mind, but as provocatives for a lustful one.”[1132] This new “sin against the Spirit” is most interesting.

On the other hand, this very nature-worship keeps his balance, where we might have thought he would lose it, on the subject of Lucretius. He contrasts the comparative triviality and childishness of Virgil, agreeable enough as it is, in regard to nature, with the mystic majesty of his great predecessor. The charges of atheism and indecency trouble him very little:[1133] the intense earnestness, the lofty delight in clouds and forests and the vague, the likeness to Æschylus and Dante—all these things he fixes on, and delights in. I wish he had written more on Dante himself; what he has[1134] is admirable.

As to Virgil in person, though sensible enough of his merits, he says things which would have elicited the choicest combinations of Scaligerian Billingsgate; and brings out, in a way striking and I think rather novel, the _permolestum_, the “serious irritation” caused by the fact that Virgil either could not or would not give Æneas any character at all, and that you feel sometimes inclined to think that he never himself had any clear idea what sort of a real man his hero was. This exaltation of the Character above the Action is very noteworthy.

But, in fact, Keble always is noteworthy, and more. Mere moderns may dismiss him, with or without a reading, as a mill-horse treader of academic rounds. He is nothing so little. He is, in fact, almost the first representative of the Romantic movement who has applied its spirit to the consecrated subjects of study; and he has shown, unfortunately to too limited a circle, how fresh, how interesting, how inspiring the results of this and of the true comparison of ancient and modern may be.[1135] Literary criticism—indeed literature itself as such—was with him, it is true, only a by-work, hardly more than a pastime. But had it been otherwise, he would, I think, twenty years before Arnold, have given us the results of a more thorough scholarship, a reading certainly not less wide, a taste nearly as delicate and catholic, a broader theory, and a much greater freedom from mere crotchet and caprice.

[Sidenote: _Garbett._]

I am not quite so well acquainted with the whole work of Keble’s successor Garbett.[1136] Elected as he was, by the anti-Tractarian reaction, against the apparently far superior claims of Isaac Williams, his appointment has generally been regarded as a job; and I had to divest myself of prejudice in reading him. He has indeed nothing of his predecessor’s serene scholarship, and little of his clear and clean taste. His form puts him at a special disadvantage. Instead of Keble’s pure and flowing Latinity, you find an awkward dialect, peppered after the fashion of Cicero’s letters with Greek words, peppered still more highly with notes of exclamation, and, worst of all, full of words, and clauses, and even whole sentences, in capitals, to the destruction of all repose and dignity. He seems to have simply printed each Prælection as he gave it (the pagings are independent), and then to have batched them together without revision in volume form.[1137] But one cannot read far or fairly without perceiving that, either before his election or after it, Garbett had taken the pains to qualify by a serious study of antecedent criticism—a study, it may be added, of which there is hardly any trace in Keble. Garbett devotes especial attention to Longinus and Dryden; and though I do not (as I have formerly hinted)[1138] agree with him in regard to either,[1139] it is beyond all doubt that he had made a distinct and original attempt to grasp both as critics. He deals with Horace, of course; but it is noteworthy that he has again aimed at a systematic and fresh view, taking Horace as the master of “Art Poetic,” and comparing Boileau, &c. He has an abundant discussion of Scaliger, whom he takes as third type and (rightly) as the father of classical French criticism, while Dryden gives him his fourth. He knows the Germans—not merely Lessing and Goethe, but Kant; and whatever the failures in his execution, he can “satisfy the examiners” not merely from the point of view of those who demand acquaintance with the history and literature of the subject, but from that of those who postpone everything to what they think philosophy. He refers to the climatic view of literature,[1140] constantly combines historical and literary considerations, and is altogether a “modern.” As has been said, I disagree with him more often than I agree; but I do not think there can be any serious denial of the fact that he was worthy of the Chair and of a place here.

[Sidenote: _Claughton._]

The tenure of his successor Claughton, afterwards Bishop, was but for a single term; and he seems to have left little memorial of it except a singularly elegant Latin address on the appointment of Lord Derby as Chancellor. Elegance, indeed, was Claughton’s characteristic as an orator,[1141] but I should not imagine that he had much strength or very wide or keen literary knowledge and enthusiasm. Of Mr. Arnold we have spoken.

[Sidenote: _Doyle._]

There were foolish folk, not without some excuse of ignorance (if that ever _be_ an excuse) for their foolishness, who grumbled or scoffed when he was followed by Sir Francis Doyle. There had been some hopes of Browning, which had been foiled—if by nothing else—by the discovery that an Honorary M.A. degree was not a qualification; and it must be owned that curiosity to see what Browning would do _in_ prose _on_ poetry was highly legitimate. Moreover, the younger generation was busy with Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, who had not turned Tennyson and Browning himself out, and they knew little of Sir Francis. Better informed persons, however, reported of him as of an Oxford man of the best old type of “scholar and gentleman,” a person of very shrewd wits, of probably greater practical experience than any Professor of Poetry had ever had, and the author of certain things like _The Red Thread of Honour_ and _The Private of the Buffs_, which, in their own peculiar style and division, were poetry _sans phrase_. The report was justified by the new Professor’s Lectures.[1142] They are frankly exoteric; but they are saved by scholarship from the charge of ever being popular in the bad sense. They adopt as frankly, and carry a little farther, that plan of making the lectures, if not exactly reviews of particular books new and old, at any rate _causeries_ hung on particular texts and pegs, which the vernacularisation of the Chair had made inevitable, and to which Matthew Arnold himself had inclined gladly enough. They are, though not in the least degree slipshod or slovenly, quite conversational in style. But they deserve, I think, no mean place among the documents of the Chair. Their easy, well-bred common-sense, kept from being really Philistine (which epithet Sir Francis good-humouredly accepted), not merely by their good breeding, but by the aforesaid scholarship, by natural acuteness, and by an intense unaffected love for poetry, might not be a good staple. But if the electors could manage to let it come round again, as an exception, once in a generation or so, it would be well, and better than well.

[Sidenote: _Shairp._]

Of Principal Shairp so many good men have said so many good things that it is almost unnecessary to add, in this special place and context, the praise (which can be given ungrudgingly) that he has always, in his critical work, had before him good intentions and high ideals. Much further addition, I fear, cannot be made. When I read his question, “Did not Shakespeare hate and despise Iago and Edmund?”[1143] when I remember how Shakespeare himself put in the mouth of the one—

“I bleed, sir, but not killed”;

in the mouth of the other—

“The wheel is come full circle; I am here”;

and—

“Yet Edmund was beloved,”

I own I sympathise with an unconventional and unsophisticated soul who, once reading this same utterance of Mr. Shairp’s, rose, strode about the room, and sitting down, ejaculated, “What are you to do? What are you to say? Where are you to go? when a Professor of Poetry, uttering such things in Oxford, is not taken out, and stoned or burnt forthwith, between Balliol and the _Randolph_?” And there is an only less dreadful passage[1144] of miscomprehension on the magnificent close of Tennyson’s “Love and Duty”—one of the greatest examples of the difficult “_Versöhnung_ close,” the reconciliation of art, the relapse into peace.

But the lesson of criticism is a lesson of tolerance. A complete and careful perusal of Mr Shairp’s _Aspects of Poetry_, and of his other books, will indeed show that the _apices_ of criticism, whether historical, or appreciative, or even philosophical, were beyond his climb. He shows that constant necessity or temptation of engaging in comment—eulogistic or controversial—upon the _ephemera critica_ of the time, which has been one of the worst results of the change of the lectures from Latin to English. You could not, in the stately old vehicle, do more than occasionally decline upon such a lower level as this. Mr Shairp is always citing and fencing with (or extolling reviewer-fashion) Arnold or Bagehot, Hutton or Myers. _Quotidiana quotidie moriuntur_; and, though no doubt it saves much trouble to Professors if they can take out of a newspaper or a review, or even a recent book, on their way to Oxford, a text for an hour’s sermon, their state _sub specie æternitatis_ is far from the more gracious. Oxford is constantly making new statutes now; I think one forbidding any citation from this Chair of critical or creative literature less than thirty years old would not be bad.

More happy, if not always more critical, were his dealings with things Scottish, where sympathy lifted him out of the peddling, and transformed the parochial. On Burns (even though there must have been searchings of heart there) he could sometimes, though by no means always, speak excellently; on Scott superexcellently; on Wordsworth almost as well; on the Highland poets (if we do not forget our salt-cellar) best of all, because he spoke with knowledge and not as Mr Arnold. His work is always amiable, often admirable: I wish I could say that it is always or often critical.[1145]

[Sidenote: _Palgrave._]

The great achievement of Mr Shairp’s successor, Francis Turner Palgrave, in regard to literary criticism, is an indirect one, and had been mostly done years and decades before he was elected to the Chair. Indeed, I think little if anything was given to the world as the direct result of his professorial work. As an actual critic or reviewer, Palgrave was no doubt distinguished not over-favourably by that tendency to “splash” and _tapage_ of manner which he shared with Kinglake and some other writers of the mid-nineteenth century, and which has been recently revived. But his real taste was in a manner warranted by his friendships; and his friendships must almost have kept him right if he had had less taste. He may have profited largely by these friendships in the composition of the two parts of that really _Golden Treasury_, which, if it does not achieve the impossible in giving everybody what he wants, all that he wants, and nothing that he does not want, is by general confession the most successful attempt in a quite appallingly difficult kind. The second part, which has of course been the most criticised, seems to me even more remarkable than the first, as showing an almost complete freedom from one easily besetting sin, the tendency not to relish styles that have come in since the critic “commenced” in criticism.

[Sidenote: Salutantur vivi.]

Of the late and the present holders of the Chair we are happily precluded from speaking critically. May the bar not soon be lifted!

-----

Footnote 1105:

Of Whitfield (or Whit_feld_, as some write) I have found nothing but that he wrote some Latin verses on William the Third. The second volume of William Hawkins’s _Tracts_ (1758) contains, besides a ridiculous tragedy, _Henry and Rosamond_, an _Essay on Drama_, principally occupied by carpings at Mason’s _Elfrida_, and some Letters on Pope’s Commentary on Homer—very small critical beer. About Wheeler I find less even than about Whitfield. The piety of his son published—long after date and in our own times—1870—the _Prælections_ of John Randolph, a man who, besides holding several other professorships at Oxford, attained to eminence in the Church, and died Bishop of London in 1813. They are very sober and respectable. There is in poetry a _non contemnenda proprietas quod imitando præcipiat_; and the warning, _non aliunde artis suæ rudimenta desumet Criticus nisi ex sanæ Logices præceptis_, might with advantage have been observed oftener than it has been. But Randolph sticks in the bark and the letter. Holmes, a poet after a fashion, a theologian, and what not, seems to have written more freely on anything than on criticism.

Footnote 1106:

He complies with the requirements of method and fashion by dealing _generally_ with the End and Usefulness of Poetry, its Kinds and so forth. But all this we have had a thousand times. What we have here specially is a comparison, and a new comparison.

Footnote 1107:

Vol. i. p. 57 _sq._

Footnote 1108:

Southey, himself a proper moral man in all conscience, but a sensible one withal, somewhere remarks, “said well but not wisely” on Hurdis’s

“Give me the steed Whose generous efforts bore the prize away, I care not for his grandsire or his dam.”

A mild echo of the revolutionary period!

Footnote 1109:

In a review in the _British Critic_ (1814), reprinted in _Papers and Reviews_, Oxford and London, 1877.

Footnote 1110:

See the _Remains_, edited by his son. London, 1871.

Footnote 1111:

First published at the end of his tenure in 1813. My copy is the 2nd ed., Oxford, 1828.

Footnote 1112:

See remarks on Trapp, pp. 6 and 7 ed. cit.

Footnote 1113:

_V._ pp. 187, 197, 390, 229, 177.

Footnote 1114:

Keble, however, was right in specifying the chief exception—the admirable prælection on _Epitaphs_ (No. 27, p. 340).

Footnote 1115:

This is all the more tantalising in that his definition of _Judicium_ in _Præl._ 2 seems to promise nothing less than an inquiry into the critical and appreciative faculty as regards Poetry.

Footnote 1116:

_V._ vol. i.

Footnote 1117:

London, 1826.

Footnote 1118:

See Beddoes’ _Letters_ (ed. Gosse, London, 1894), p. 68: “Mr Milman (our poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable here by denouncing me as one of a ‘villainous school.’” These Letters are crammed with matter of literary and critical interest. I was much tempted to give them a place in the text as illustrating the critical opinions of a person in whom great wits and madness were rather blended than allied; in the transition generation—the _mezzanine_ floor—of 1800-1830.

Footnote 1119:

_Prælectiones Academicæ Oxonii habitæ annis_ 1832-41. Oxford, 1844. 2 vols., but continuously paged.

Footnote 1120:

_Occasional Papers and Reviews_, by John Keble, M.A. Oxford and London, 1877.

Footnote 1121:

_Occ. Pap._, p. 62.

Footnote 1122:

The place most perilously aleatory is the fling in _Occ. Pap._, p. 87, at “Mr Leigh Hunt _and his miserable followers_.”

Footnote 1123:

_Occ. Pap._, p. 6.

Footnote 1124:

Ibid., p. 150.

Footnote 1125:

Ibid., pp. 98-102.

Footnote 1126:

Those who make the contrast will, however, I think, find out that Arnold owes more to his forerunner than might be gathered from his published lectures.

Footnote 1127:

P. 312.

Footnote 1128:

_Præl. Ac._, p. 281.

Footnote 1129:

It occupies seven Prælections (xvii.-xxiii.) and some 200 pages.

Footnote 1130:

ii. 415.

Footnote 1131:

ii. 586.

Footnote 1132:

ii. 641. He has a liking for Horace; but objects to him (not quite unreasonably) as _sordidior quidem_ in his Epicureanism, when you compare him with Lucretius.

Footnote 1133:

He allows him, as well as Byron and Shelley, the plea of _vix compos_ in certain respects.

Footnote 1134:

ii. 678 _sq._ and elsewhere.

Footnote 1135:

I pass, as needless to dwell on at length, the excellence of his style and expression in these lectures. “So acute in remark, so beautiful in language,” as Newman says in the letter printed in _Occ. Pap._, p. xii. _sq._

Footnote 1136:

My only _possession_ is _De Re Critica Prælectiones_. Oxford, 1847.

Footnote 1137:

My copy, which is “from the author” to some one unknown, has not a few pen-corrections, apparently in his own hand.

Footnote 1138:

Vol. ii. p. 372.

Footnote 1139:

It is particularly unfortunate that he has endeavoured to construct a theory of Longinus as a statesman-critic, comparing him with Burke. I have already said that I do not think the identification of the author of the book with Zenobia’s prime minister in the least disproved or (with the materials at present at disposal) disprovable: but it certainly is not proved to the point of serving as basis to such a theory.

Footnote 1140:

With reference to Schlegel and Madame de Staël.

Footnote 1141:

His sermons have been disrespectfully spoken of; but I think unjustly. I heard them myself in pretty close juxtaposition with those of Pusey and Wilberforce, and even with the, in both senses, rare discourses of Mansel. In vigour and body they were nowhere beside any of these; but they could fairly hold their own in the softer ways of style.

Footnote 1142:

First Series (comprising the “Inaugural,” with two others on “Provincial Poetry” and _The Dream of Gerontius_), London, 1869. A second appeared in 1877.

Footnote 1143:

_Aspects of Poetry_ (London, 1881), p. 30.

Footnote 1144:

Ibid., p. 157.

Footnote 1145:

How entirely _un_critical he was may be judged from the fact that he brackets Voltaire and Diderot as apostles of the _Aufklärung_ in an anti-Romantic sense.

APPENDIX II.

AMERICAN CRITICISM.

AN ATTEMPT IN OUTLINE ONLY—ITS DIFFICULTIES— THE EARLY STAGES—THE ORIGINS AND PIONEERS— TICKNOR—LONGFELLOW—EMERSON—POE— LOWELL: HIS GENERAL POSITION—‘AMONG MY BOOKS’— ‘MY STUDY WINDOWS‘—‘ESSAYS ON THE ENGLISH POETS’— LAST ESSAYS—O. W. HOLMES—THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS STATED BY HIM _IN ALIA MATERIA_— WHITMAN AND THE “DEMOCRATIC” IDEAL— MARGARET FULLER— RIPLEY—WHIPPLE—LANIER.

[Sidenote: _An attempt in outline only._]

I am very well aware of the arguments which may be advanced against attempting to extend our survey of criticism across the Atlantic. I at least do not undervalue the apparently formal, but in truth real, objection that we have undertaken _European_ criticism only: while I appreciate the opposite demur, that the space of an appendix is as uncomplimentary and as uncomplementary as total exclusion would be. But after having taken counsel of more than one American friend, by no means specially Anglophile in temper, I found that, apparently, the inclusion even in this form would be at least sometimes taken in the spirit in which it is meant, while on the other hand I had myself felt very strongly the disadvantage of excluding such a critic as Mr Lowell, who has all the characteristics of the best of our own with an inviting _differentia_. The bursting-point, however, of this volume is pretty nearly reached; and I must again observe that there is no invidious intention in the proportion of the notice. I have endeavoured to allot to Mr Lowell himself a space (allowing for differences of scale and type) not, I think, unfair in proportion to his English fellows; others I have had to survey more in summary. But I hope that the whole may at any rate provide a not inadequate outline-sketch of the subject; and in this hope I submit it, not merely to English readers, but to those still more nearly concerned, from some of whom this book has received attention at once of the most candid (in the better pre-Sheridanian sense of that word) and of the most searchingly competent.

[Sidenote: _Its difficulties._]

The difficulties of the task are complicated by the necessity, according to our plan, of omitting living writers. The history of American criticism appears, even more than that of other departments of literature, to be very mainly a history of the present; and I could write _ex abundanti_ on that. The “middle distance” is also well provided. But the origins are singularly obscure, and appear to be regarded with neither pride nor interest by Americans themselves. When I thought of this excursus first, some years ago, I was referred by an American friend to two articles[1146] which had appeared not long before in _The International Monthly_ on “American Literary Criticism and the Doctrine of Evolution.” The title gave me some forebodings in its doubleness; yet this might be interpreted favourably, for how can you treat the “evolution” of a subject without treating its history? I found, however, that the author, though his papers lacked neither thought nor style, was wholly occupied with the doctrine of evolutionary criticism generally, as against judicial and appreciative; and that he did not even propose to meddle with the history of his subject save by occasional allusion. The histories of American literature have afforded me something more, but not much.

[Sidenote: _The early stages._]

I do not mention this in any spirit of fault-finding, for few people are less likely than myself to need reminding that in literary and critical history, as elsewhere, you cannot make bricks without straw, and still less without clay. There was, and there could be, little attempt at important criticism in “colonial” times, and the immense material expansion of the earlier Republican period was very little more favourable to it than the quiescence and dependence of the Monarchical.[1147]

The definite entrance of the United States into the society of nations, after the second war with England and the settlement of Europe by the final suppression of Napoleon, as necessarily brought with it the organisation of critical as of other employment for the intellect. [Sidenote: _The origins and pioneers._] There is something agreeably Arcadian in the idea of Longfellow, a boy of nineteen, being sent to Europe by the trustees of his college to qualify himself for a Chair of Literature; but the fact is no more and no less creditable to these functionaries than it is symbolic of the new tendencies of the time. Still, Longfellow was not actually the apostle of comparative and extensive criticism in America. Ticknor, his elder by eighteen years, had, partly no doubt by this very fact of the admission of his country to the full franchise of nations, been induced to give up the study and practice of the law, and to devote himself to literature, in the very year of Waterloo itself. And he too, after a sojourn in Europe, became, some years before his fellow at Bowdoin, Professor of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres at Harvard. Emerson, born between the two, was a little later in treading the same road than either, but he trod it; and his visit to Europe, in 1833, determined the critical writings and lectures which followed.

These three I should take to be the founders of American criticism of the adult and accomplished kind, and they represent it, interestingly enough, in three different ways. It is true that no one of them is first of all a critic, or even, as Mr. Lowell was afterwards, a critic in power at least equal to that of any other of his qualities. But this was only in the nature of things.

[Sidenote: _Ticknor._]

It is not merely because Ticknor’s lifework was a literary history that one may call him first of all a literary historian. The fact that the _History of Spanish Literature_, more than fifty years after its publication, and nearly seventy after its inception, although the interval has been one of the fiercest in pursuing, and one of the most voluminous in recording, literary explorations, retains, and is likely to retain, its position not merely as a classic, but as an authority, shows some pre-established harmony between writer and task. Yet, though the provinces of the literary historian and the critic overlap to a very large extent,—though the historian who is not a critic must be a mere reference-monger, and the critic who is not a historian a mere bellettrist,—yet there are skirts and fringes of each province which are not necessarily part of the other. Ticknor is rather less of a critic than he is of a historian—his grouping of facts, his investigation and statement of them, his perception of origins and connections, are all a little superior to his appreciation pure and simple. Yet there are few who can afford to look down on him in this latter respect; and as historical critic and critical historian I do not know where to look for his superior, while I should have very soon done looking for his equals.

[Sidenote: _Longfellow._]

Longfellow (for it will be convenient to take Emerson last) shows us, as a matter of course, a different critical phase. He never, so far as I know, wrote any connected study of literature, and I do not think that it would have been very good if he had. His lectures, which were necessarily numerous, and the articles which he wrote (I believe in no small numbers) have never taken any important position, and again I should doubt whether, if we had them or more of them, anything very remarkable would be included.[1148] Yet he had, and displayed in the intensest degree, that most agreeable and not least profitable function of the critical faculty which attaches itself to literature, assimilates it, transforms it into instruction and delight. This is noticeable in almost every page of his poems: it is the very genesis of many of them, and perhaps of the best of them: it is at once the explanation and the refutation of the charge of want of originality brought against him. So in his prose. _Hyperion_ and _Outre-Mer_ are permeated and saturated with it. The literature of Germany, the literature of Spain, have done more than colour the poet’s or prose-writer’s work; they have penetrated to its substance, fed it, been digested and absorbed into its very life. From _The Golden Legend_ and _The Spanish Student_ to the smallest fragments this process is noteworthy. And while it shows, on the part of the writer himself, processes necessary to the critic, in intenser and more poetic form, it performs on the reader “the office of the critic”— his hierophantic, initiating, inoculating office—in the most vivid and forcible manner and degree. No one who, susceptible to literature, but more or less ignorant of it, reads Longfellow but must, consciously or unconsciously, imbibe something of literature itself—of a literature far wider and deeper than that which the poet (though I speak as a lifelong lover of Longfellow’s poetry) himself creates.

[Sidenote: _Emerson._]

That Emerson also is not first of all a critic is not surprising, because, as most people have seen, Emerson is not, first of all, anything but Emerson. But he is in some ways more of a critic than either of the others, and the reason why he is not more so still is that, like his master or analogue Carlyle, he rather refuses to look on literature as literature. His ethical preoccupations and his transcendentalism alike prevent him from doing this—he is Carlyle _plus_ Vinet. In the second place, if I may say so without offence, he shows us, as neither Ticknor nor Longfellow, both of whom were too cosmopolitan, shows us, the American touch-me-not-ishness, the somewhat unnecessary affectation of nationality. The literary chauvinism of the famous lecture on “The American Scholar” is perhaps more apparent than real; but his query, “Who is Southey?” in the record of his interview with Landor, is awkward. “Southey is, say what you like about his poetry or his politics, one of the greatest _men of letters_ of all time,” is the answer which a critic should have given to himself. Yet there is much good positive criticism in Emerson (if there can be said to be anything positive in him), and there is still more of that vague stimulative force which is so noticeable in these first great writers of America, and which is so interesting when we consider their circumstances, individual and national. In the _English Traits_ and the _Representative Men_, in the lectures and elsewhere, there is always ringing to the fit ear the “_Tolle, lege!_” of the greater critics, with the comment which helps to make the book understood, when it is taken up and read.

[Sidenote: _Poe._]

By the ’Thirties and ’Forties of the nineteenth century the European pilgrimage was no longer necessary to fetch the critical spark home. American criticism became abundant, and not merely abundant. In no case do I so much regret the necessity of compression as in that of Poe. The extreme and almost incomprehensible injustice with which the ill-fated author of _Ligeia_ and _The Haunted Palace_ was so long treated by his countrymen has, I believe, abated; and I have seen, in the article referred to, a complimentary, though merely passing, reference to him as a critic. But there is still room, I think, for some substantial _Rettung_, as Lessing would have said. The substance would have to be considerable, for the matter under consideration,[1149] which is not small in bulk, is heterogeneous, and even to some extent chaotic. More than any other part of Poe’s work it is the scapegoat of his unfavourable circumstances, of his patchy education, of his weaknesses in conduct, temper, and constitution. A great deal is mere hack-writing— _chaînes de l’esclavage_—stuff never meant to abide the steady judgment of posterity. You may, if you please, pick out of it the most amazing things, such[1150] as that “for one Fouqué there are fifty Molières” (I am no undervaluer of Fouqué, but I wish—I _do_ wish—that I knew where to look for even one of the forty-nine additional Poquelins); and “for one Dickens ... five million ... Fieldings,” where perhaps five million marks of exclamation might not inadequately meet the case. Generous as is the praise which he heaps upon Mrs Browning and Mr Horne; true as much of what he says is; one feels that his observations want _reducing_, adjusting, co-ordinating under the calmer influence of comparative and universal criticism. There was not the slightest reason why he should get into such a frantic rage with, the “devilled kidneys” (a most pleasant and wholesome food) in that very pleasant and wholesome book _Charles O’Malley_; or why he should have so furiously resented Mr Lowell’s remarks on himself in the _Fable for Critics_, open as these are to criticism; or why he should have said or done a hundred other things of the kind. His “hungry heart and burning,” his ill-disciplined intellect and temper, drove him in all sorts of directions, and not unfrequently in the wrong ones.

Yet his critical instincts were almost always right; and not seldom they were remarkably original. Considering what the ways of poets are, and that Poe had his full share of the then prevailing American soreness towards “British” writers, I know few things in literature more pleasant and edifying at once than his enthusiastic and intelligent welcome of Tennyson. “The Rationale of Verse,” though there are faults in it, due to ignorance or carelessness in terminology, to haste, and to imperfect reading, is one of the best things ever written on English prosody, and quite astonishingly original. Although, when he takes a great deal of pains it is apt to be rather lost labour, as, for instance, in the comically laborious dissection of Longfellow’s _Spanish Student_ (a delightful thing if taken in the proper way), the acuteness which he often shows even in such pieces, and much more in his lighter _aperçus_, is remarkable. The _Marginalia_ are full of good things—I find, after reading them anew for this purpose, that my reference slips “stand like the corn arow.” His dislike of German criticism[1151] may have been half opposition to Carlyle, between whom and himself there was a gulf fixed; and he should not have said that Macaulay had more true critical spirit than both the Schlegels put together. But this very passage is worth pondering, and it was very bold at the time. I do not think he borrowed the true observation of the resemblance between _Hudibras_ and the _Satyre Menippée_.[1152] His defence of the “rhetorician’s rules”[1153] is just and lively: it is not a little noteworthy that he, the most apparently irregular and spasmodic of men of genius, perfectly understands the importance of Form.

And all this, let it be remembered, was written, not merely in distress, and in disease, and sometimes in despair, but—to adapt the Dickensian and Gautieresque juxtaposition—in the ’Thirties and 'Forties, when, as we have seen, criticism in England itself had fallen into the state from which it was aroused by Matthew Arnold years after Poe’s death; when Carlyle was turning his back on it, when Macaulay was acknowledging that he was not the man for it, when the men who meddled with it were showing absolute want of comprehension of Tennyson, and passing Browning over as beneath their notice. It was written in spite of the bad influence (discernible enough, as it is, in Poe) of the swaggering, swashbuckler fashion of “British” criticism itself. It was written before—long before in most cases—Lowell came to his maturity as a critic. It is, except in flashes and indications, mostly a might-have-been. But that might-have-been, translated into fact, would, I think, have ranked with the most noteworthy critical achievements that we possess in regard to poetry and _belles-lettres_. On other departments Poe could probably never, in the most favourable circumstances, have laid much hold. But in his own sphere he not only did the works, but knew those who did them and how they were done.

[Sidenote: _Lowell: his general position._]

On the whole, however, I suppose that a majority of the best judges would award the place of premier critic of America to Mr Lowell, and I should certainly not attempt to contest the judgment. He had, in an eminent degree, most of the qualities which our long examination has enabled us to specify as generally found in good critics; catholic and observant reading, real enthusiasm for literature, sanity of judgment, good-humour, width of view, and (though this perhaps in rather less measure than the others) methodic arrangement and grasp. He was free, not merely from the defects which are the opposites of these good qualities, but from others—the niggling and carping of the gerund-grinder and the _gradus_-hunter,[1154] the hideboundness of the type-and-kind critic, and above all the incomprehensible and yet all-pervading inability to like something because it is not something else. He could put his perceptions brightly and forcibly—in a way perhaps rather tempting to re-read than at once sinking into the memory, but not the less excellent, and perhaps (in criticism) rather the more uncommon, for that.

On the wrong side of the account there are of course some things to put. I shall not be suspected of wishing to banish quips and cranks from criticism, but Mr Lowell was perhaps a little too prodigal of them. His patriotism was a little aggressive—not in the way (which he had far too much critical good sense ever to tread) of overvaluing his countrymen’s literary performances, but in too often infusing into his criticism a sort of _Nemo-me-impune-lacessit_ flavour which was quite unnecessary, and in fact almost entirely irrelevant. And lastly, as has been hinted above, his grasp was not always sure. To compare the two papers on Gray, written at no great interval of time, by him and by his slightly younger contemporary Mr Arnold, is very interesting and instructive. I am not sure that, if it were just (or indeed possible) to extract separate good critical things, like nuggets, from the two essays, and weigh the parcels against each other, the American would not prove the richer, even allowing weight for length. But Gray is not “put” in the Harvard man’s essay as he is in the Oxonian’s: the critical contact is less full and vital, the congress less complete. It may be urged, indeed, that the selection is not quite fair, because of the unusual sympathy, and as it were harmony pre-established, between the Graian and the Arnoldian temperaments; but the same slight shortcoming will be found elsewhere.[1155]

[Sidenote: Among my Books.]

Mr Lowell’s best known book of literary criticism is, no doubt, _Among my Books_; but though it shows his method characteristically enough, it is by no means mainly bookish: in fact, I think there is rather less in it about the literary part of the matter than in others. The famous essay on “Dryden” is of course a standard, and perhaps its author’s diploma-piece as a critic; and the “Shakespeare once More” (a title suggested by Goethe) is a very interesting literary _pot-pourri_. But the “Lessing” and the “Rousseau” are chiefly biographical; and such papers as “Witchcraft” and “New England,” attractive as they are, are from the literary point of view quite “off,” as literary slang has it. There is nothing to object to in this, for the general title covers subjects suggested by books, or the subjects of books, quite as amply as books-by-themselves-books; and there can be no doubt that the reader usually likes the others best. But the whole volume shows its author well as a scholar but not a pedant, a man of letters who is also a man of the world, and a judge who, though by no means ideally impartial, and even with a tolerably well-stuffed portfolio of prejudices, can give judgments not to be pooh-poohed at the worst, and at the best things worthy to take their place with the best of judge-made law in our subject.

[Sidenote: My Study Windows.]

The equally well-known _My Study Windows_ does not contain, as the title may seem to intimate, matter of _more_ mixed quality as regards pure literature, but the quality is still mixed. Mr Lowell was not happy in his reception of the avatar of Mr Swinburne: it is indeed so rare for a man of more than middle age to be quite at focus with a new poet, that some of the wiser or more pusillanimous of our kind decline in such cases to register a formal judgment. The “Carlyle” is much tainted by political prejudice, though it does credit to Mr Lowell’s perspicacity to have so early found out in Carlyle that real “Toryism” which was so long mistaken. But the “Chaucer” and the “Pope”—differ here and there with them as we may or must—are solid and substantive contributions to the main shelf of criticism; while in the lower ranges “The Life and Letters of James Gates Perceval” only needed more quotation and more ruthlessness to make it a pendant to Macaulay’s “Montgomery.”

[Sidenote: Essays on the English Poets.]

The Essays which have been reprinted in England, with the permission of Mr Lowell and with a Preface by his own hands, as _Essays on the English Poets_[1156] (including those on Lessing and Rousseau as a very welcome though not exceedingly relevant bonus or make-weight), are partly drawn from the two books just noticed. Some of them seem to have been written rather early; most were originally lectures to a university, and may have a little sacrificed literature to instruction. The best by a good deal is, I think, the “Wordsworth,”[1157] which, though there are many good essays on Wordsworth to make up for the many bad ones, deserves to rank almost with the best. It is seldom that in a single essay one finds such a capital specimen of delicate appreciation as the comparison of the fall of Goethe’s _Ueber allen Gipfeln_ to “blossoms shaken down by a noonday breeze on turf”; so good an example of the criticism of epigram as “Wordsworth is the historian of Wordsworthshire”;[1158] and so fine and just a critical simile as the comparison of Milton’s verse to a mixed fleet of men-of-war and merchantmen, which comes shortly after. The “Milton” itself has more to do with Milton’s editor and biographer than with Milton, and is marred by that curious impatience of a reasoned prosody which appears in Mr Lowell so often. So is the Spenser—quite admirable in great part of it—by the author’s well-known and excessive depreciation of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century poetry.[1159] The “Keats” leaves off just when we are expecting the critic to begin. As if to carry out unity of cross-purpose, if of nothing more, the “Lessing” hardly says anything about Lessing’s criticism, and the “Rousseau” is chiefly about Rousseau as a man. But though, putting the “Wordsworth” aside, the contents of the volume would hardly have given us a fair idea of Mr Lowell’s critical powers by themselves, it could have been written by no bad critic as a whole, and in part could only have been written by a very good one.

[Sidenote: _Last Essays._]

As nearly always, too, this critic’s last work is of his best. The “Gray” we have noticed. The “Landor” is mainly, though not wholly, personal; and the “Walton,” as a “Walton” must be and ought to be, rather of life rather than of literature. But the paper on the _Areopagitica_ is an admirable piece, and “On the Study of Modern Languages” stands, I think, alone among the arguments on its side, distinguished at once by competent knowledge and judicial fairness in regard to ancient and modern alike.

So much critical gift, indeed, of so wide a range and so happy in its display, is seldom to be found. And though nothing is more impertinent than to recommend a representative to a constituency to which you do not yourself belong, I think that perhaps these volumes may give me the right to say that if I were an American I should vote for Mr Lowell, and that whatever might be my nationality I should say “Well done!” if he were elected.

[Sidenote: _O. W. Holmes._]

To pass to yet another of the same distinguished group. There is, though a great deal of indirect, not much direct criticism in the omniform and (when the writer could keep the cant of anti-cant out) almost always agreeable trilogy of the _Breakfast-Table_. But there is one passage[1160] in the last of the three which, with hardly an alteration, is so admirable and final a description of the duty of the critic himself that I must borrow it with some slight interlineations. These, I am sure, Dr Holmes—if only as to a brother member of the Rabelais Club of pleasant memory—would not have refused me:—

[Sidenote: _The whole duty of critics stated by him_ in alia materia.]

“Now the present case, as the (critic)/doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before—a snarl and tangle of special conditions out of which it is his business to wind as much thread as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such noses, and just such eyes, and just such mouths: but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his business is with that and no other person’s—with the features of the worthy father of a family before him, and not with the portraits he has seen in galleries, or books, or Mr Copley’s grand pictures of the fine old Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture. It is the same with (critic’s subject)/the patient. His (production)/disease has features of its own; there never was and never will be another case in all respects exactly like it. If a (critic)/doctor has science without common-sense he treats a (book)/fever, but not this man’s (book)/fever. If he has common-sense without science he treats this man’s (book)/fever without knowing the general laws that govern (books and all literature)/all fevers and all vital movements.”

Which thing let it be frontlet and wristlet to whosoever meddles with criticism.

[Sidenote: _Whitman and the “Democratic” ideal._]

The poet who seems to some possibly rash non-American persons to divide with Poe the prize due to the worthiest in American poetry, was also a critic—less of the professional kind, much more _borné_, but more concentrated, and in some ways more influential. The critical views of Walt Whitman are scattered all over his not inconsiderable works, but are to be found brought together and marshalled most aggressively in his prose _Democratic Vistas_, with their “General Notes,” and in the _numeris lege solutis_ of the _Song of the Exposition_. According to these views, though Whitman speaks of individual writers (not merely Shakespeare but even Scott) with warm admiration, and with nothing of the curious blindness which has characterised some of his followers in the line, “English literature is not great” because it is anti-Democratic and Feudal. These “Notes” must develop something quite different, and of the nature of an antidote. All “warrior epics” are “void, inanimate, passed,” and so forth. The expression of this is often, as Whitman’s expression constantly is, admirable, and the temper of it is always intentionally wholesome and generous. If I regard it as hopelessly bad criticism, it is not (to repeat the refrain once more) because I disagree with its conclusions, but because it seems to me to start from a hopelessly wrong principle, and to proceed on hopelessly mistaken methods. That principle and those methods, _mutatis mutandis_, would justify _me_ in dismissing—nay, would force me to dismiss—as void, inanimate, worthless, mischievous, something of Heine, much of Shelley, more of Hugo, and very nearly the whole of Whitman himself—four poets in four different countries born, whom, as it happens, if I were the responsible literary adviser of a new King Arthur of Poetry, I should bid him summon among the very first to his Round Table. To the critic, as I understand criticism (and if I may adapt a famous text of Scripture), Feudalism is nothing and Democracy is nothing, but the Spirit of Literature. Whitman did not think so, and unfortunately his ideas (which may have been partly suggested by Emerson) have found followers who have not always mellowed and antidoted the crude poison of theory with the generous wine of temperament and expression.

Of the remarkable, if somewhat abortive, “Transcendental” group in the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century, George Ripley and Margaret Fuller seem to call for notice here: as specimens of later writers, Whipple and Sidney Lanier may suffice, in the impossibility of including a considerable _numerus_.[1161]

[Sidenote: _Margaret Fuller._]

The critical writings of the Marchesa Ossoli are, I suppose, chiefly contained in the volumes of her works entitled _Art, Literature, and Drama_, and _Life Without and Life Within_. They have much interest, and I think deserve the position assigned to her[1162] as the first American woman who had regularly trained for criticism, and as being in a way the chief of all such to the present day. They have, however, certain characteristics which perhaps might be anticipated. The merely silly reproach of transcendentalism leaves “Margaret” unscathed. She does not talk nonsense. But she does talk a little vaguely and loosely; and it does seem rather difficult for her to keep her eye steadily on any one object. We know that she will overvalue Goethe; it was, as we have pointed out, the very form and pressure of the time that made her do so, and probably to no country was the gospel according to Wolfgang a more powerful and beneficent gospel than to the United States of America in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But when we read, _in English_, that “the frail Philina, graceful though contemptible, presents the degradation incident to an attempt at leading an exclusively poetic life,” or that “not even in Shakespeare” has she “felt the organising power of genius as in” Ottilie of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_, we think a great deal more than there is room or necessity here to say. The article on Poe’s Poems is very curious; the critic appears as a sort of she-Balaam, without that unlucky prophet’s generous frankness when he found he could not help it; she cannot ban, and will not bless freely. That on _Philip van Artevelde_ is more curious still in another way. It makes the most enormous and yet indecisive sweeps before attacking its subject, feints at the whole question of Classic _v._ Romantic, says more about Alfieri (who seems to have been Margaret’s favourite poet) than about Taylor, and finally despatches the nominal theme in very few and very inadequate words. She is always attractive[1163]—this “_Margarita_ del Occidente”—this new “Margarite of America,” and the ideas which, before reading, some may have formed of her as of a sort of “mother of all such as are schoolmarms” melt at once in contact with her work. But would she ever have become a great critic? I doubt it; she certainly had not become one when she died. She was thinking of things other than the Power of the Word. Better, if anybody likes; but other.

[Sidenote: _Ripley._]

Her editor, I think, and, with Emerson, certainly her teacher, the Reverend George Ripley, did very much to imbue his country with foreign literature; not a little to help it to understand that literature. Ripley has been very highly spoken of, by good authorities, for the attempts which he made to produce a higher standard and a wider range of literary scholarship in the United States: and in fact there is no doubt that the Transcendental group did yeoman’s service in this way, their work not a little resembling that done in Germany a hundred years, or a little less, earlier. But I do not know many of his later Reviews in the _Tribune_, and his _Specimens of Foreign Literature_, two volumes published at Boston in 1838 as the ushers and samples of a much larger library of the subject, are not in the least literary, but purely philosophical. They give translated extracts from Cousin, Jouffroy, and Benjamin Constant, with Introductions and rather copious notes or short excursus. The whole shows knowledge, judgment, and a real critical capacity; but these good gifts are, as has been said, devoted to the philosophic, not the literary character and achievement of their subjects, and it is very noticeable that of the nearly twenty books or parts of books which are announced as to form the intended library, more than half are purely philosophical and only a small part purely literary.

[Sidenote: _Whipple._]

Of Whipple I chiefly know the two volumes of _Essays and Reviews_, which appeared as long ago as 1849. He must have written much else, as he did not die till 1886; but the contents of these volumes are bulky enough and varied enough, I should suppose, to afford a fair field of judgment. His countrymen have, I believe, rather outgrown him, and do not at present rank him very high; but the “perspective of the past,” as it “firms,” will probably establish him in a fair though not a very high place. He seems to me to have been one of the first American writers who set themselves to be critics without further ambitions, and took literature calmly to be their province in the judicial way. He might, no doubt, have had more style: not that his is bad, but that it is undistinguished, wanting more grace to win that prize and more vigour to win the other. He might also have had more grasp. His dicta are occasionally unfortunate: one reads that Pinkney has written “as well as Lovelace and Carew, better than Waller, Sedley, _Etherege_, and Dorset”; and asks for those works of Pinkney which are as good as “To Althea,” and “To Lucasta,” and “To A. L.”; better than “Phillis is my only Joy” and “To all you Ladies.”[1164] And it is strange to find a man in two minds about Keats, and sure that Barry Cornwall has “splendid traits of genius.” But these things will happen. I do not know what Whipple’s education was, but I should rather doubt whether he had been sufficiently brought up on the chief and principal things to keep his eye from wandering and “wobbling.” His article on the Elizabethan dramatists has a fatal look of being founded rather on Lamb and Hunt and Hazlitt than on Dodsley and Dilke. Still he is by no means a merely negligible quantity in our calculus. He has interesting separate things— a capital, and, for an American at the moment, very magnanimous article on Sydney Smith; two notable ones on Talfourd and “British Critics”; early, and so valuable, notices of _Jane Eyre_ and _Vanity Fair_. A paper on “South’s Sermons” makes one regret that he did not turn his attention more to older literature—perhaps he would have had more doubts about the superiority of Pinkney if he had. Again, he saw, what has often to this very day been foolishly denied, the _intellectual_ importance of Tennyson—in fact, he seems to have been on the whole more disposed to the philosophical than to the purely artistic side of poetry. Of perhaps his two most ambitious essays the “Byron” has the commonplaceness which Byron’s eulogists and detractors alike so commonly display; but the “Wordsworth” is much better. He could hardly be called a critic of genius or even of great talent, but he was fair, not ill-informed, interested and disinterested (both in the good senses) and evidently a “corn-and-seeds-man”—that is to say, a critic—“in his heart.” Which things, if they could be said of all of us, so much the better.

[Sidenote: _Lanier._]

Mr Sidney Lanier was, I believe, greatly thought of, and was the object of still greater hopes on the part of those who knew him personally; and though his career was cut short, there appear in his remains such a love for literature, and such an ardent desire to keep that love pure and high, that one cannot but be well affected to him. It is, however, rather difficult to believe that he would ever have been a really great, or even a fairly catholic and competent, critic. Occasional utterances and _aperçus_, when the planets were kind, must at most have been his portion. In the literature of criticism, which has many strange things, there is hardly anything odder than his _The English Novel and the Principle of its Development_,[1165] which is simply a long, rather discursive, and wholly laudatory review of George Eliot. The selection of the individual is a matter of little consequence: I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog’s-ear place of these pages the warning, “_Never_ judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.” But the narrowing down of so mighty a theme to the glorification of _any_ single novelist of a passing day would have been enough to throw the gravest doubts on Mr Lanier’s competence.

Unluckily there is more. “The quiet and elegant narratives of Miss Austen,” as the sole notice dealt out to its subject by the author of a treatise on _the English Novel_, “speaks” that author with a disastrous finality. A man need not go all lengths for Miss Austen, just as he need not for Milton or Virgil; but if in a study of Latin or English poetry as a whole he contented himself with referring _obiter_ to “the elegant and scholarly verse of Virgil” and the “serious and careful productions of Milton,” we should know what to think of him. The oddest thing in Mr Lanier’s book, however, is his intense, his obviously genuine, and I think his quite nationally disinterested abhorrence[1166] of the “Four Masters”—of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. _Pamela_ is “a silly and hideous realisation” of a really immoral idea. Fielding’s morality is similar, but “more clownish.” Sterne “spent his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits.” He “can read none of these books without feeling as if his soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy, miserable.” He would “blot them from the face of the earth.” They are “muck.” Praise of them is simply “well-meaning ignorance.” Is it ungenerous in face of this last statement to ask whether it is well-meaning _knowledge_ which represents “Mr B.” not once but often as not an orphan but a widower, and Pamela as the servant, not of his mother but of his wife? I know that Mr Lanier died before he could revise these lectures for publication. But the point happens to be of some, if slight, importance, and when we take it in conjunction with the facts that Mr Lanier thought admirers of _Tom Jones_ must centre their admiration on Allworthy, and that he accounted for the unpopularity of _Daniel Deronda_ by asserting that English society felt its satire too keenly, our old brocard of _judicia ignorantium_ doth something buzz i’ the ear.

But Mr Lanier, though a younger man than Mr Lowell, was, to say nothing of his inferiority in genius, practically a member of an older school, corresponding, as I have already remarked, to one which not all contemporaries of his had outgone in England itself, and which, for the matter of that, we have not universally outgone even now. Since his day American criticism (except for that in all probability passing diversion into “Democratic” parochialism which has been noticed) has become very much more cosmopolitan, very much more fully developed, and in particular very much more learned. It has perhaps, of the very latest years, gone a little too much to Germany for patterns, and plunged too often into the German _cul-de-sac_ maze of specialist monographs—a dangerous and soul-killing wilderness, wherein many positively foolish and hurtful things are done, and where at the best the places are all too often dry. Yet some of these very monographs have been executed in a manner escaping the dangers and avoiding the drynesses, and not a few both of the authors of them and of others have shown soul and sight considerably above the mere trail-hunting of the specialist. If all living American critics were to be carried off by a special epidemic, I should be sorry for two reasons—first of all, because several of them are my personal friends, and secondly, because I should have to extend this appendix to an altogether unmanageable length. But meanwhile there is no doubt that Mr Lowell handed in, once for all, the “proofs” of American criticism, and that it has nothing now to do but to go on and prosper.

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Footnote 1146:

Vol. ii., Nos. 1 and 2, July and August 1900 (Burlington, Vt.) The author is Mr W. M. Payne.

Footnote 1147:

In the colonial period not even the untiring industry and the microscopic enthusiasm of Professor Tyler have discovered anything critical. Mr Charles F. Richardson in _American Literature, 1607-1885_ (New York and London: Putnams, 1887), i. 396, says plumply, “Criticism did not exist in this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nor did it make much showing until the nineteenth century was well advanced.” There is far less of it, for instance, in Washington Irving than one might expect. Perhaps some may think that an exception ought to be made for Channing. But his Essay on Milton, which is the chief critical thing of his known to me, produces that sense of bafflement which, if I remember rightly, Renan expresses in regard to him on other grounds: “We are aware that it is objected to poetry that it gives wrong views of life....” “We gaze on Satan with an awe not unmixed with mysterious pleasure....” &c., &c. With such matter we have known how to deal in the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth it loses significance.

Footnote 1148:

The chief source of my direct knowledge of his work of the kind is the collection called _Drift-Wood_, which I have known for very many years. Somewhat later—the _Drift-Wood_ papers date from before 1840—he inserted critical introductions in his _Poets and Poetry of Europe_ (1845).

Footnote 1149:

It fills half the third volume and all the fourth in Mr Ingram’s edition of the works (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1874).

Footnote 1150:

In the article on Lever, where some special gadfly seems to have stung Poe.

Footnote 1151:

_Marg._, 76.

Footnote 1152:

Ibid., 114.

Footnote 1153:

Ibid., 177.

Footnote 1154:

He comes perhaps too close to this in his paper on “The Library of Old Authors”; but there was certainly no little provocation in the editing, and even in the selection, of some of the volumes of that always comely and mainly comfortable series.

Footnote 1155:

On some minor defects it is not worth while to dwell. Lowell could see that Guest had no ear for verse: yet he was all his life long as impatient as Guest himself of that duly transferred and adapted “classical” system of English prosody which could be easily shown to justify almost all the things he himself liked, and to explain the badness of those which he thought bad. He began this impatience quite early with Poe in the _Fable for Critics_; and he never shook it off.

Footnote 1156:

London, n. d. The Preface is dated 1888.

Footnote 1157:

Ed. cit., pp. 184-239.

Footnote 1158:

Unfortunately the readers of that very peculiar kind of literature the “County History” are not often critical students of literature itself: so the charm of this remark may be missed.

Footnote 1159:

This intolerance of things not quite “best and principal” was almost as much a _tic_ with him as with Mr Arnold. I was once praising some recently printed Old French poems to him. “Are they better than Chrestien?” he said. And he would not read them.

Footnote 1160:

_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, chap. v.

Footnote 1161:

The poets Bryant and Whittier have respectable reputations as critics, and, from what I know of their other work, are likely to have deserved them. But on the same ground I rather doubt whether it is necessary to investigate their criticism for the present purpose. Nor do I think that the critical work of Bayard Taylor, of which I have some knowledge, imperatively calls for notice. American Shakespeare-critics (with Richard Grant White at their head) might occupy a special excursus, not without advantage.

Footnote 1162:

As, for instance, by Professor Brander Matthews, _Introduction to American Literature_ (New York, 1896), p. 226.

Footnote 1163:

And she can sometimes be piquant. This of the Schlegels: “Men to find plausible meaning for the deepest enigma, or to hang up each map of literature, well painted and dotted, on its proper roller,” is quite inspiriting and tempts one to regret that she was thrown away on Transcendentalism and Italomania.

Footnote 1164:

One might add the question, “What has ‘Gentle George’ Etherege to do in this galley?” though he pulls a good oar in another.

Footnote 1165:

New York, 1883. The characteristics here noted appear also in the recently and handsomely produced book on the Elizabethan period, _Shakespeare and his Forerunners_, 2 vols., 1903. The much earlier _Science of English Verse_, 1880, attempts to explain prosody by musical signs, and is thus out of the pale.

Footnote 1166:

The expressions quoted and others will be found at pp. 169-183, _op. cit._ Lanier, though quite unprejudiced, I think, by nationality, was badly bitten by the equally fatal though less ignoble mania of “Progress,” and by the moral heresy. He shows the same marks as do so many pre-Arnoldian English critics of the mid-nineteenth century.

INDEX.

Adolphus, John Leycester (1795-1862), 272 _note_. Addison, 7, 8, 38, 54, 58, 72 _sq._, 146, 176, 189, 194, 227 _note_, 231, 398. _Adventurer, The_, 67 _sq._ _Advice to an Author_, 158. _Ægri Somnia_, 337 _sq._ Æschylus, 46, 47, 103, 225, 226, 400. _Æsthetica_, Baumgarten’s, 148 _sq._ Æsthetics, v. Bk. vii. ch. v., ibid., ch. vii. _passim_. Ainger, Canon, 257 _sq._ Akenside, 57. _Aletheophilus_, 149. _Alice Fell_, 216 _note_. Alison, Archibald (1757-1839), 164-167, 291 _note_. _Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste_, 150. Amiel, Henri Frédéric (1821-1881), 388, 594-598. _Among my Books_, 637. Ampère, J. J. (1800-1864), 300. _Ancient Mariner, The_, 219. André, Yves Marc de l’Isle-, Père (1675-1764), 146, 151, 186 _note_. Andrieux, François G. J. S. (1759-1833), 130 _note_. _Anima Poetæ_, 218 _sq._, 227 _sq._ _Anti-Jacobin, The_, 286 _sq._ Antoniewicz, Herr J. von, 15 _note_, 30, 147. _Appreciations_, 548 _sq._ Ariosto, 36, 69, 77, 161, 179, 400. Aristophanes, 46, 47, 252. Aristotle, _passim_. Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), 33, 37, 46 _note_, 55, 57, 96, 118, 120, 126, 150 _note_, 218, 222, 230, 245, 286, 295, 302 _note_, 312, 320, 326 _note_, 369, 420, 482, 505 _note_, 515-537, 589, 623. _Art d’Écrire_, Condillac’s, 99 _note_. Ashe, Thomas (1836-1889), 220 _note_. Asselineau, Charles (1820-1874), 453. _Atala_, 316. Auger, Louis S. (1772-1829), 132, 133 _note_, 136. Austen, Miss, 108.

Babou, Hippolyte (1824-1878), 453. Bacon, 153, 176, 232. Bagehot, Walter (1826-1877), 542, 543. Balzac (the elder), 311, 312. —-- (the younger), 303, 457. Banville, Théodore de (1823-1891), 450. Barbazan, 177. Barbey d’Aurévilly, Jules (1808-1889), 433-436. Basil, St, 538 _note_. Batteux, 29, 43, 131. Baudelaire, Charles (1821-1867), 452. Baumgarten, Alex. G. (1714-1762), 148-150, 392. _Baviad_ and _Mæviad, The_, 286 _sq._ Béat de Muralt. See Muralt. Beattie, 57. Beaumont, Sir George, 205. Beddoes, 620, 621. Beers, Mr H. A., 69 _note_. _Beiträge_, Gottsched’s, 20. Benlowes, Edward (1603-1676), 6, 7. Bentley, 183 _note_. _Bertram_, Coleridge’s critique on, 213 _note_, 219 _note_. Beyle, Henri (1783-1842), 135-139, 160. _Bijoux Indiscrets, Les_, 94. _Biographia Literaria_, 201 _sq._ _Blackwood’s Magazine_, 502-504. See also De Quincey, Lockhart, Maginn, Wilson. Blair, 104, 128, 131, 157 _note_, 163 _note_, 166. Blake, William (1757-1827), 232, 236, 244, 266-269. Blankenberg, 150. _Blossoms of Helicon, The_, 7 _note_. Boas, Herr, 380 _note_. Boccaccio, 124. Bodmer, Johann Jakob (1698-1785), 20-28, 193, 392. Boileau, 14, 21, 124, 129, 177, 377. _Bon Gaultier Ballads, The_, 289. Borinski, Dr K., 16 _note_, _sq._ Borrow, George, 283 _note_. Bosanquet, Mr, 168, 169 _note_, 183 _note_, 573 _note_. Bouhours, 12, 131. Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850), 218, 229, 279-281. Boyer [Bowyer], 218. —-- Philoxène (1827-1867), 453. Bradley, Prof., 616, 629. Braitmaier, Herr F., 15 _note_, and Bk. vii. ch. ii. _passim_, 148. Brandes, Dr, 386 _note_. Breitinger, Johann Jakob (1701-1776), 20-28, 148. Bridges, Mr Robert, 207 _note_. Brimley, George (1819-1857), 504-508. _British Muse, The_, 175 _note_. Browne, Sir T., 297. Browning, Mrs, 514 _note_. Brumoy, 39, 43 _note_. Brunetière, M., 184, 309, 455, 469. Bryant, 641 _note_. Brydges, Sir Samuel Egerton (1762-1837), 283, 284. Buchanan, Mr Robert, 561 _note_. Buchner, August (1591-1661), 17. Bunyan, 161, 163. Bürger, Gottfried August (1747-1794), 378, 379, 384, 576. Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), 162-164, 229, 400. Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 5-7. Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788-1824), 110, 136, 228, 234, 280-282, 371 _sq._, 376.

Caine, Mr Hall, 426 _note_. Callières, 12, 176. Campbell, Mr Dykes, 219 _note_, 221 _note_. —-- Thomas (1777-1844), 112 _note_, 232, 272-274. Canning, 288 _sq._ Capell, Edward (1713-1781), 175 _note_. Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 38, 48, 385, 387 _sq._, 393, 416 _sq._, 405-409, 537 _sq._ Caro, Esme Marie (1826-1887), 465, 466. Carrière, Moritz (b. 1817), 573-575. Castelvetro, viii, 195. Catullus, 124, 277. _Causeries_, Sainte-Beuve’s, 317 _sq._ _Censura Literaria_, 282, 283 _note_. Cervantes, 159, 182. Channing, William E. (1780-1842), 631 _note_. _Character of a Small Poet_, 6, 7. _Characteristics_, 158, 159. _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_, 258, 259. Chasles, V. E. Philarète (1798-1873), 432, 433. Chateaubriand, François Aug., Vicomte de (1768-1848), 99, 109-117, 131, 194, 313-317. _Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire_, 313-317. Chaucer, 71, 77, 174, 256, 258, 273, 409. Chenier, A., 117. —-- M. J. (1764-1811), 130, 131. Chesterfield, 504 _note_. Christopher North. See Wilson, John. Church, Richard William (1815-1890), 558. Cicero, 124. Claudian, 282. Claughton, Thomas Legh, Bishop of Rochester (1808-1892), 626. Coleridge, Mr Ernest, 218, 227. —-- Hartley (1796-1849), 283 _note_, 485-487. —-- Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 37, 126, 142, 149, 155, 168, 194, 197 half-title, 200-233, 236, 239, 243, 249, 250, 256, 258, 278, 288, 291 _note_, 310, 375, 392, 393, 396 _note_, 411 _sq._, 418 _note_, 472, 478, 484, 487 _note_, 489, 536, 541, 548. Collier, J. P., 209 _note_. Collier, Jeremy, 257. Collins, 58. —-- Mr Churton, 427 _note_. _Comic Writers, The English_, 256, 257. “Comparative Literature,” 460 _note_, 462 _sq._ Condillac, 99 _note_. Congreve, 161, 239. Conti, Antonio (1677-1749), 23 and _note_, 51 _note_. Conybeare, John Josias (1779-1824), 620. Copleston, Edward, Bishop of Llandaff (1776-1849), 618-620. Corneille, 13, 37, 161, 397. Courthope, Mr, 616, 629. Cousin, Victor (1792-1867), 133. Cowper, 204, 228. Creed, The Romantic, 409, 410. Creighton, Bishop, 603. Crépet’s _Poètes Français_, 450 _sq._ Crisp, “Daddy,” 39 _note_, 43 _note_. “Criticism of Life,” 531 _sq._ Croce, Signor Benedetto, 152 _note_, 155, 169 _note_, 589 _note_. Croker, John Wilson (1780-1857), 494, 509. _Cromwell_, Preface to, 331 _sq._

Dallas, Eneas Sweetland (1828-1879), 511-513. Dante, vi, 114, 179, 180, 210 _note_, 214-216, 228, 247, 248, 256, 534 _sq._ Danzel, 19 _note_, 20. _Defence of Poetry_, Shelley’s, 274, 275. _De la Littérature_, Madame de Staël’s, 101 _sq._ _De la Littérature Allemande_, 48-51. _De l’Allemagne_, 101 _sq._ _De Constantia Jurisprudentis_, 153. _De Logomachiis Eruditorum_, 18. _De Meteoris Orationis_, 19. _De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus_, 148, 149. _De Studiorum Ratione_, 152. _De Vulgari Eloquio_, 201, 210, 215, 216. Defoe, 242. Delille, 122 _sq._, 333. Delius, 575. Denham, 6. Denina, ix. Dennis, ix, 286, 408. De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 81, 355 _note_, 405 _note_, 412, 478-482. De Sanctis, Francesco (1817-1883), 589-591. Descartes, 146. Dickens, 364 _note_. Diderot, Denis (1713-1784), 41, 89-97, 99, 109, 111, 117, 178, 185, 190 _note_, 192, 194, 217. _Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen_, 19. _Dies Boreales_, 473 _sq._ _Diskurse der Maler_, 19 _sq._ Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848), 284. _Divina Commedia, The_, 108. Dobell, Sydney, 514 _note_. _Doctor, The_, 235 _sq._ _Don Quixote_, 182. Doudan, Ximenès (1800-1872), 436-438. Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings Charles (1810-1888), 626, 627. Dryden, 6, 9, 14, 44 _note_, 54, 55, 71, 159, 179, 192, 200, 222, 229, 249, 256, 310, 330, 364, 398, 418 _note_, 443, 504, 513 _note_, 520. Du Bellay, 200. Ducange, 177. Dussault, Jean F. J. (1769-1824), 129. Dyer, 58.

Eberhard, Joh. Aug. (1739-1809), 151. Eckermann, Joh. Peter (1792-1854), 301, 366 _sq._ _Edinburgh Review, The_, 213 _note_, 286, 290. Egger, M., 319. _Elia_, 237 _sq._ Elton, Professor, vi. Elwin, Whitwell (1816-1900), 510. Elze, 575. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), 633, 634. _Emile_, 98. _English Metrists_, 83 _note_. _English Rhythms_, 235 _note_. _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, 296. “Esemplastic,” } “Esenoplastic,” } 228. _Essai sur le Beau_, 151. _Essai sur les Fictions_, 102. _Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron_, 94. _Essay on Genius_, 164 _note_. _Essay on Pope_, 66. _Essay on Taste_, Alison’s, 164-167. —-- Gerard’s, 164 _note_. —-- Jeffrey’s, 164, 291 _note_. _Essays in Criticism_, 521 _sq._ _Essays on Men and Manners_, 63. _Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary_, 160. Etienne, 130. Euripides, 200. _Excursion, The_, 213.

Faguet, M. Émile, 339, 469. Farmer, Dr, 488. Feletz, C. M. Dorimont, Abbé de (1767-1850), 132. Felltham, Owen, 297 _note_. Fénelon, 177. Feydeau, 324 _note_. Fichte, 417. Fiévée, 130. Finlay, Mr F. G., 62 _note_. Fiorentino, 348 _note_. _Firmilian_, x. Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880), 116, 120, 189, 228, 454, 461, 545, 581. Flemming, 369. Flint, Professor, 152 _note_, 153 _note_, 156. Fontanes, Louis, Marquis de (1757-1821), 112 _not_, 113, 127. Fontenelle, 9, 56, 177, 195, 230. _Fool of Quality, The_, 539. Forman, Mr Buxton, 473 _note_. Foscolo, Ugo (1778-1827), 407 _note_. Foster, John (1731-1774), 83. —-- (1770-1843), 513. Fournier, Edouard (1819-1880), 453. Fox, W. J. (1786-1864), 513. France, M. Anatole, 455 _note_, 469. Franciosi, Signor, viii. Frederick the Great (1712-1786), 48-51. Freytag, Gustav (_b._ 1816), 578, 579. _Friend, The_, 219. Froude, James Anthony (1818-1894), 539. Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850), 164, 642.

Garat, Dominique Joseph (1749-1833), 130. Garbett, James (1802-1879), 625, 626. _Gaspard de la Nuit_, 305. Gautier, Théophile (1811-1872), 36, 120, 324 _note_, 338-342, 450, 475 _note_. _Gay Science, The_, 512 _sq._ _Gaya Scienza, La_, 583. Gellert, 28 and _note_, 50. _Génie du Christianisme_, 111 _sq._ Geoffroy, Jules-Louis (1743-1814), 128, 129. Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795), 165 _note_, 291 _note_. Gervinus, G. G. (1805-1871), 575-577. Gibbon, 323. Gifford, William (1756-1826), 232, 242, 253, 286 _sq._, 289 _note_. Gilpin, 83. Ginguené, Pierre Louis (1748-1816), 130. Girardin, Saint-Marc (1801-1873), 320, 343, 344. _Globe_, The, 300 _sq._, 367, 368. Godwin, 243, 253, 263, 270 _note_. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), 50, 97, 106, 117, 168, 193, 223 _note_, 251, 300, 301, 366-377, 388. _Goetz von Berlichingen_, 50. Goncourt, Émile (1822-1867); and Jules (1830-1870), de, 124, 307 _note_, 452 _note_, 458, 459. Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 56 _note_, 128, 546 _note_. —-- M. Etienne, 128. Gottsched, 12, 19, 20, 24 and _note_, 193, 392. _Götzen-Dammerung_, 585. “Grand Style,” The, 522 _sq._ Gravina, 9, 56. Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), 53, 63, 81, 186, 194, 203, 212, 217, 418 _note_. Grillparzer, Franz (1791-1872), Bk. ix. half-title, 569-573, 582 _note_. _Grotesques, Les_, 341. Gryphius, Andreas (1616-1664), 18, 30, 31. Gudeman, Professor, vii. Guest, Edwin (1800-1880), 235 _note_, 637 _note_. Guizot, François P. G. (1787-1874), 133 _note_. —-- Mme., see Meulan. Gurney, Edmund (1847-1888), 559-661. Guttinguer, Ulric (1785-1886), 308 _note_.

Haldane, Mr, 582. Hallam, Arthur Henry (1811-1837), 513 _note_. —-- Henry (1777-1859), viii, 293-298, 474. Haller, 28 and _note_. Hamann, Johann Georg (1730-1788), 352, 353, 359. _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_, 34 _sq._, 94 _note_. Hamelius, Herr, 13. Hannay, Mr D., 48. —-- James (1827-1873), 511. Hardenberg, F. von, see Novalis. Hawkins, William (1722-1801), 616 _note_. Haym, R., 386 _note_. Hayward, Abraham (1801-1894), 509. —-- Thomas (_d._ 1779?), 175 _note_. Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 224, 229, 232, 234, 238, 239, 244, 247, 248, 251-266, 273, 280, 314 _note_, 412 _sq._ Hegel, G. W. F. (1776-1831), 188. Heine, Heinrich (1799-1856), 27 _note_, 50, 386, 563-566, 571, 573 _note_. Heinsius, 40. _Héloise, La Nouvelle_, 98, 102. Helps, Sir Arthur (1813-1875), 509, 510. Henley, Mr W. E., 561 _note_. Hennequin, Émile (1859-1888), 222, 459-462. _Henriade_, The, 114. Herder, Johann G. (1744-1803), 49, 149, 353, 355-359, 380, 392. Héricault, Charles d’ (1823-?), 453. Heywood, 239. Hillebrand, Karl (1829-1884), 579-581, 582 _note_. _Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_, 440 _sq._ _Histoire du Romantisme_, 341 _sq._ _Histoire Littéraire de La France_, 177. _History of English Poetry_ (Warton’s), 70 _sq._ Hoeck, Theobald, 16, 17. Hoffman, François B. (1760-1828), 129, 130. Hoffmann, 565. Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1884), 639, 640. —-- Robert (1748-1805), 616 _note_. Homer, 114, 154 _sq._, 162, 521 _sq._ _Hommes et Dieux_, 451. Horace, 39, 49, 73 _sq._ Horne, Richard Hengist (1803-1884), 263 _note_, 514 _note_. Houghton, Lord (Milnes, Richard Monckton) (1809-1885), 557. _Hudibras_, 104. Hueffer, Mr, 560. Hughes (editor of Spenser), 173. Hugo, Victor F. M. (1802-1885), 120, 127, 131, 185, 197 half-title, 307, 330-335, 336, 337, 345, 346, 369, 371, 434, 438, 461, 591, 593. Hume, David (1711-1776), 159-162. Hunt, James Henry Leigh (1784-1869), 232, 234, 239, 246-251, 257, 412 _sq._ Hurd, Richard (1720-1808), Bishop of Worcester, 1, 7, 40, 41, 53, 72-80, 93, 179, 185, 189 _note_, 190 _note_, 192, 273. Hurdis, James (1763-1801), 617, 618. Hutton, Richard Holt (1826-1897), 543, 544.

_Ideen_ (Herder’s), 357, 358. _Imagination and Fancy_, 248. _Inner Life of Art, The_, 542. _Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language_, 85, 86. Irving, Sir H., 96 _note_. —-- Washington, 631 _note_.

_Jacques le Fataliste_, 91. Janin, Jules (1804-1874), 453. Jean Paul, see Richter. Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 112 _note_, 128 _note_, 232, 274 _note_, 289-293, 408. Johnson, 75, 85, 194, 195, 217, 222, 279, 310, 398, 408, 424, 435, 605. Joubert, Joseph (1754-1824), 1, 99, 117-126, 128, 194, 264 _note_, 333, 370, 390. Jouffroy, 300.

Keats, John (1795-1821), 55, 275 _note_. Keble, John (1792-1866), 621-625. Ker, Professor, vi. Kingsley, Charles (1819-1875), 538, 539. Kirke-White, 234. Klopstock, 28, 359 _note_. Klotz, 45, 47, 357. _Knight’s Quarterly_, 490 _sq._ Koberstein, 15 _note_. König, N. (1688-1744), 22, 23, 51 _note_. Kont, M., 39 _note sq._ Krantz, M., 146 _note_. _Kritische Dichtkunst_, _K. Betrachtung_, &c., see Bodmer.

La Bruyère, 8. Lacretelle, 130. La Fontaine, 124. La Harpe, 4, 12, 289, 296. Lamartine, 137 _note_, 346. Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 232, 234, 236-246, 257, 412 _sq._ Lancaster, Henry Hill (1829-1875), 511. Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 276-279. Langhorne, 533. Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881), 643, 644. _Laocoön, The_, 36 _sq._ Latouche, H. de, 348 _note_. _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 498. _Leader, The_, 542 _note_. Le Bossu, 131. Leibnitz, 228. _Lectures_, Coleridge’s, 220 _sq._ _Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth_, 257, 258. _Lectures on the English Poets_, 252 _sq._ Legouvé, 130. Lemaître, M. Jules, 470. Lemcke, Professor, 419. Lemercier, L. Népomucène (1771-1840), 131, 132. Lemoyne, the Père, 116. _Les Deux Masques_, 451. _Les Templiers_, 106. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-1781), 33-48, 94 _note_, 97, 117, 163 _note_, 176, 178, 181, 185, 187, 193, 214, 222, 249, 388, 392, 545. _Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns_, 201 _note_. _Letter to John Murray_, 280. Letters of Schiller and Goethe, 381 _sq._ _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, 75 _sq._ _Lettres d’Amabed, Les_, 94. _Lettres sur les Anglois et sur les François_, 13, 14. _Lettres sur Rousseau_, 101, 102. Lewes, George Henry (1812-1878), 540-542. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742-1799), 354. _Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_, 331 _sq._ Locke, 146, 176. Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 412, 482-485. _London_, 561 _note_. _London Magazine, The_, 554 _note_. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882), 632, 633. Longinus _passim_. Lope de Vega, 39 _note_. Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891), 286, 630, 636-639. Lowth, Robert, Bishop of London (1710-1787), 617. Lucian, 252. Lucretius, 159, 161, 200. Lydgate, Gray on, 61, 62. _Lyrical Ballads_, Preface to, 201 _sq._

Macaulay, Thomas B. (1800-1859), 14 _note_, 39 _note_, 257, 272, 297, 489-495. Mackenzie, Henry, 345. Maginn, William (1793-1842), 166, 437-449. Magnin, C. (1793-1862), 347, 348. _Maid of the Mill_, The, 224. Maistre, Joseph de, 139, 305. Malebranche, 146. Mambrun, 46. Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-1871), 557. _Marginalia_, Coleridge’s, 220 _sq._ _Marius the Epicurean_, 544 _sq._ Marivaux, 178. Marmontel, 34, 35, 131, 177. Martial, 39 and _note_, 381. Mason, John (1706-1763), 79-82. —-- William, 57 _sq._ Masson, Professor, 478 _note_, 480. Matthews, Professor Brander, 641 _note_. Maupassant, Guy de, 454 _note_. Mazzini, 589 _note_. _Mélanges Littéraires_ (Chateaubriand’s), 112 _note_. _Mélanges tirés d’une Petite Bibliothèque_, 140. _Mémoires d’un Touriste_, 139. Mendelssohn, Moses (1729-1786), 32, 33. Menéndez y Pelayo, Señor, 588. Mérimée, Prosper (1803-1870), 135, 137, 348-350, 435. Meulan, Pauline de, 133 _note_. Michelet, Jules (1798-1874), 329, 330. Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873), 106, 514. Milman, Henry Hart (1791-1868), 509, 620, 621. Milnes, see Houghton. Milton, 8, 22 _sq._, 61, 114, 122, 176, 212, 229, 279, 400, 523 _sq._ Minto, William (1845-1893), 553, 554. _Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary_, 225. Mitford, William (1744-1827), 83-86, 491. “Modern,” the term, 3, 4. Moland, Louis (_b._ 1824), 453. Molière, 124, 136, 397. _Monachopornomachia_, 45. _Monsieur Nicolas_, 382. Montagu, Mrs (Elizabeth Robinson) (1720-1810), 173 _note_. Montaiglon, M. de (_b._ 1824), 310 _note_, 453. Montaigne, 177. Montégut, Émile (_b._ 1825), Bk. ix. half-title, 443 _note_, 444-447. Montgomery, Robert, 493. Morandi, Signor Luigi, 588. Morley, Mr John, 591. _Morte Amoureuse, La_, 36. Munro, H. A. J. (1819-1885), 183 _note_. Muralt, Louis Béat de (1665-1741), 13-15. Myers, Frederic William Henry (1843-1901), 552 _note_. Mylius, Christlob (1722-1754), 28 and _note_. _My Study Windows_, 637, 638.

Nerval, Gérard de (= Gérard Labrunie), 450 _note_. Nettleship, Henry (1839-1893), 183 _note_. _Neveu de Rameau, Le_, 91. Nicholls, 180. Nicolai, 32. Nicolas, Sir N. Harris (1799-1848), 283, 284. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900), 581-586. Nisard, Désiré (1806-1888), 335-338. _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, 472 _sq._ Nodier, Charles (1780-1844), 139, 140. North, Christopher, see Wilson, John. _Nouveaux Lundis_, 324 _sq._ “Novalis,” _i.e._, Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), 386-390, 565.

_Observations on Poetry_, 83 _note_. _Observations on Spenser_, 68 _sq._ Oeckhe Othoblad, see Hoeck, Theobald. Oldys, William (1696-1761), 54, 174, 175 and _note_. _Omniana_, 225. Omond, Mr T. S., 83 _note_. _On Translating Homer_, 521 _sq._ Opitz, 192, 298 _note_, 357 _note_, 400. _Orientales_, Preface to the, 85, 331 _sq._ _Ossian_, 59, 104, 112 _note_, 116, 135, 176, 359. Ozanam, 348 _note_.

Paculford, Professor, 538 _note._ Palgrave, Francis Turner (1824-1897), 628, 629. _Paradoxe sur le Comédien_, 91 _sq._ _Parerga und Paralipomena_, 566 _sq._ Paris, Gaston (1839-1903), 464, 465. Pascal, 124. Pater, Walter Horatio (1839-1894), 120, 183 _note_, 326 _note_, 451, 544-551. Patmore, Coventry K. D. (1823-1890), 558, 559. Patrizzi, 222, 334, 533. Pattison, Mark (1813-1884), 557. _Paul et Virginie_, 115. Paul, Mr Kegan, 538. Payne, Mr W. M., 631 _note_. Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 162 _note_, 274, 537. Pemberton, Henry (1694-1771), 83 _note_. Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), Bishop of Dromore, 53, 64-66, 192. Petrarch, 179. Petronius, 209 _note_. _Pharonnida_, 273, 290, 408. Philips, Ambrose (1675?-1749), 54 _note_. Phillips, Edward, 244. Philostratus, 275 _note_. Pindar, Peter. See Wolcot. _Plain Speaker, The_, 259, 260. Planche, J.B. Gustave (1808-1857), 344-347. Plato, 142, 156, 274. Plutarch, 97. Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), 634-636. “Poetic Moment, The,” 143 _sq._, 532 _sq._ Poitou, M., 118 _note_. Politian, viii, 183 _note_, 277, 296. Pollock, Mr W. H., 96 _note_. Pontmartin, Armand, Comte de (1811-1890), 467, 468. Pope, 66, 67, 104, 161, 176, 194, 200, 273, 279-282, 368, 424. _Port Royal_, 310-313. _Portraits Contemporains_, 306 _sq._ _Portraits Littéraires, Portraits de Femmes_, Sainte-Beuve’s, 303 _sq._ _Power of Numbers, The, in Prose and Poetry_, 80-82. _Prœlectiones Academicæ._ See Copleston, Keble, &c. _Preface_ to _Lyrical Ballads_, &c., 200 _sq._ —-- to Mr Arnold’s _Poems_, 517 _sq._ _Premiers Lundis_, 200 _sq._ Prior, 8, 173. _Principles of Success in Literature, The_, 540 _sq._ Pringle-Pattison, Professor, 514 _note_. _Promenades dans Rome_, 139. Prudhomme, M. Sully, 465. _Pursuits of Literature, The_, 287 _sq._ Posnett, Mr H. M., 460 _note_. _Power of Sound, The_, 559. Pye, 83.

_Quarterly Review, The_, 213 _note_. Quinet, Edgar (1803-1875), 329, 330. Quintilian, 124, 222, 228 _note_. Quintus Smyrnæus, 302 _note_.

Rabelais, 177-225. Racine, 115, 123, 136, 161, 311-313. _Racine et Shakespeare_, 155-157. Radcliffe, Mrs, 253. Raleigh, Professor, vi, 202 _note_, 212 _note_, 216 _note_. Ramsay, Allan, 54. Randolph, John (1749-1813), Bishop of London, 616 _note_. Raynouard, 106. _Recreations of Christopher North_, 472 _sq._ _Reisebilder_, The, 563 _sq._ _Rejected Addresses_, 289. _Reliques_, Percy’s, 65 _sq._ Rémusat, Charles de, 300. Renan, Ernest (1723-1892), 348, 439, 446. Repplier, Miss Agnes, 219 _note,_. _Retrospective Review, The_, x, 283, 286. Reynolds, Sir J., 523. _Rhadamanthus_, 234 _note_. _Rhetoric_, De Quincey on, 481 _sq._ Rhys, Mr E., 201 _note_, 279 _note_, 280 _note_. Richardson, 92, 93, 102, 256, 257. —--, Mr C. F., 631 _note_. Richter, Jean Paul F. (1763-1825), 106, 384-386. Ripley, George (1802-1880), 642. Ritson, 65. Rivarol, 287. Rogers, Henry (1806-1877), 514. _Rolliad_, The, 288 _note_. _Roman Experimental, Le_, 455 _sq._ _Romania_, 464 _sq._ _Romeo and Juliet_, 108. Rönnfeldt, Mr, 360 _note_. Ronsard, 177, 192, 298 _note_. Roscoe, W. C., 514 _note_. Rousseau, 97-99, 108, 110, 178. Rümelin, Gustav (1815-1889), 577, 578. Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 115 _note_, 120, 228, 539, 540. Rymer, 34, 35, 247, 297.

_Saint Louis_, 116 _note_. Saint-Victor, Paul, Comte de (1827-1881), 120, 440, 441, 450, 451. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804-1869), 46 _note_, 119, 126, 127, 133 _note_, 135, 138, 189, 197 _half-title_, 222, 230, 300-329, 343 _note_, 414 _sq._, 420, 431, 443, 450, 513 _note_, 585, 589, 592. Sainte-Palaye, 172, 177. _Salons_, Diderot’s, 96. Sand, George, 260 _note_, 435. Sandys, Dr, vii, 183 _note_. _Satyrane’s Letters_, 218 _note_, 219 _note_. Saunders, Mr Bailey, 566 _note_. Scaliger, 69, 222, 377. Schack, 181. Schelling, Professor, 419. Scherer, Edmond (1815-1889), 96, 443, 447-450, 594. Schiller, Joh. Chr. Friedrich (1759-1805), 105 _note_, 106, 193, 225, 229, 367, 368, 377-384. Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1767-1845), 29, 378, 381, 391-402, 438. —--, Johann Adolf (1721-1793), 29, 30, 43 _note_. —--, Johann Elias (1718-1749), 30-32, 147, 193, 359. Schlegel, Johann Heinrich, 20 _note_. —--, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (1772-1829), 29, 391-402, 571. Schlegels, The, 29 _sq._, 101 _sq._, 117, 133, 181, 221 _note_, 222, 273, 371, 391-402. Schlosser, 405. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), 566-568. Schreyvogel, Joseph, 573 _note_. Schubarth, Karl Ernst (1796-1861), 403, 404. _Scienza Nuova_, 152-157. _Schönes Blumenfeldt_, 16. Schottel, Justus G. (1612-1676), 17. Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 136, 179, 232, 247, 253, 260, 263, 270-272, 290, 371 _sq._, 457, 533 _note_. Sellar, William G. (1825-1890), 183 _note_. Seneca, Diderot on, 94, 95. Senior, N. W. (1790-1864), 509. Sévigné, Mme. de, 52 _note_. Shadwell, 14. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of (1671-1713), 157-159. Shairp, John Campbell (1819-1885), 627, 628. Shakespeare, 22, 30, 37, 41, 42, 50, 52 _note_, 104, 122, 127, 132, 170, 172, 173, 176, 187, 188, 220 _sq._, 225, 241 _sq._, 258, 259, 260, 297, 353, 359, 361, 376, 388, 519 _sq._, 533, 550. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 232, 244, 260, 274, 275, 376, 387, 507. Shenstone, William (1714-1763), 53, 63, 64, 174, 202. Sidney, 229, 253, 257. Sismondi, 592 _note_. “Skroddles,” 59. Smith, Adam (1723-1790), 12, 157 _note_. —-- Mr D. Nichol, 68 _note_, 173 _note_. —-- Mr Gregory, 83 _note_. —-- Sydney, 509. —-- William H. (1808-1872), 502 _note_. Solger, Karl W. F. (1780-1819), 404. _Soliman the Second_, 34, 35, 188. _Sophocles_, 161, 162. Sorel, Ch., ix. Soret, 370 _note_. Southern, Henry (1799-1853), 283. Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 218 _note_, 225, 229, 232-237, 243, 244, 272, 617 _note_. _Specimens_, Campbell’s, 272. —-- Lamb’s, 240. _Specimens of British Critics_, 473 _sq._ _Spectator, The_, 20. Spence, 616. Spenser, 64, 68 _sq._, 71, 76 _sq._, 104, 173, 174, 225, 249, 256, 273, 409, 473 _sq._ _Spirit of the Age, The_, 262, 263. _Sprüche in Prosa_, 361 _sq._ Staël, A. L. Germaine Necker, Mme. de (1766-1817), 99-109, 116, 127, 194, 291 _sq._, 392 _sq._ Stapfer, M. Paul, 294 _note_. Stephen, Sir James (1789-1859), 514. —-- Sir J. Fitzjames (1829-1894), 557. —-- Sir Leslie, 561 _note_. Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), 86-88, 176, 178, 363, 364, 435. Stevenson, Mr E., 426 _note_. —-- Robert Louis (1850-1894), 251, 494 _note_, 561 _note_. Stryienski, M., 135. _Studies in the History of the Renaissance_, 544 _sq._ _Study of Celtic Literature, The_, 521 _sq._ _Style, Lecture on_, Coleridge’s, 226 _sq._ —-- De Quincey on, 481 _sq._ Sulzer, Johann G. (1720-1779), 150, 365, 366. Swift, 176, 229, 443. Swiss-Saxon Quarrel, the, 27 _sq._ Symonds, John Addington (1840-1893), 551, 552.

_Table Talk_, Coleridge’s, 224 _sq._ —-- Hazlitt’s, 261. Taillandier, Saint-René (1817-1879), 465, 466. Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828-1893), 107, 307 _note_, 440-444. Talfourd, 283 _note_. Tasso, 76, 179. Tassoni, 35. Taylor, Bayard, 641 _note_. —-- William, “of Norwich” (1765-1836), 497. Tennyson, 225, 425 _sq._, 484, 502-507. Terence (Diderot on), 93, 94, 161. _Tertium Quid_, 559 _sq._ Texte, Joseph (1865-1900), 97, 99, 107, 177 _note_, 462-464. Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863), 98, 263, 452, 499-502, 555. Theocritus, 277. _Theophila_, 6 _note_. Thomson, James (I.), 176, 400. —-- James (II.) (1834-1882), 552, 553. Tickell, 58. Ticknor, George (1791-1871), 181, 348 _note_, 632. Tieck, Ludwig (1773-1853), 390, 391. Tollemache, Mrs L., 96 _note_. Traill, Henry Duff (1842-1900), 231, 232, 554-557. Trapp, 616. Tressan, Comte de, 177. _Tristram Shandy_, 86. Tyler, Professor, 631 _note_.

Uhland, Johann Ludwig (1787-1862), 402, 403. Ulrici, 575.

Vaughan, Professor, 274 _note_, 499. Venables, George Stovin (1810-1888), 557. Veuillot, Louis (1815-1883), 468, 469. Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 9 _note_, 146, 152-157, 185 _note_, 267 _note_, 356 _note_, 589 _note_. Vida, 36. Vigny, Alfred de, 306 _note_. Villemain, Abel François (1790-1865), 126, 133-135, 327. Vinet, Alexandre R. (1797-1847), 592-594. Virgil, 115, _note_. Vitet, Louis (1802-1873), 300. Voltaire, 37, 77, 115, 125, 138, 176, 370. _Vorschule der Æsthetik_, 385. Voynich, Mr, viii.

Wagner, 582 _sq._ Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794-1852), 266 _note_. Walpole, Horace, 52 _note_. Ward, Mr Humphry, his _English Poets_, 531 _sq._ Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 53, 66, 68, 279. —-- Thomas, the elder (1688?-1745), 616. —-- the younger (1728-1790), vii, 53, 68-72, 192, 616. Watson (the printer), 54. Weckerlin, G. R. (1584-1651), 17. Weise, Christian (1642-1708), 17, 18. Werenfels, Samuel (1625-1703), 17, 18. Wernicke, Christian (1661-1725), 17, 18. Wheeler, Benjamin, 616. Whipple, Edwin P. (1819-1886), 642, 643. Whitfeld, John, 616. Whitman, Walt (1819-1892), 640. Whittier, J. G., 641 _note_. Wilson, John, “Christopher North” (1785-1854), 412, 472-478, 486. Wieland, Christoph R. (1733-1813), 106, 359, 360, 385, 392, 400. _Wilhelm Meister_, 117, 361 _sq._ _William Shakespeare_, 336 _sq._ _Wither_, 242. Wolcot, John, “Peter Pindar” (1738-1819), 286 _sq._ Wolf, 156. Wolff, 147. Wonderful, The, Bodmer on, 24 _sq._ Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 200-218, 229, 243, 249, 268, 290, 322, 622 _sq._ Woty, William (1731-1791), 6 _note_. Wrangham, Archdeacon, 201. Wright, Thomas (1810-1877), x, 283 _note_. Wynn, C. W., 234. .sp 1 .ix _Xenien_, The, 380 _sq._

Young, 176.

Zesen, Philip von (1619-1689), 17. Zinano, vii. Zola, Émile (1840-1903), 454-458. Zürich School, the, Bk. vii. ch. ii. _passim_, 56.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.

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Transcriber’s Note

There is a section after the Preface which specifies corrections and additions to be made in the current volume, as well as volumes 1 and 2. These changes were _not_ made.

No attempt was made to check the validity of each index entry’s references, however several of them seem spurious:

“Professor Pringle-Patterson” is referred to only in a note on p. 581, but the page mentioned in the Index is incorrectly given as p. 514.

The entry for “Thomas Love Peacock” refers to a note on p. 207, but he is mentioned in none of those notes. He is, however, mentioned in a footnote on p. 162. The page number has been changed.

The second page reference (p. 137) for Adam Smith was incorrect. The correct page is p. 157, and has been changed.

Notes

494.4: A passage (“What! ... in the “Bunyan”?) opens with a quotation mark, but employs a double quote for two quoted words, and fails to provide a closing quote.

160.11: The title of Hume’s “Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary” is partially italicized, with the last phrase in normal font as emphasis.

Corrections

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.

16.33 die Anf[ang/änge] der literarischen Kritik Replaced.

20.4 _Historie der Deutschen Sprache[,] Poesie_ Added.

24.13 philosophy from Leibni[t]z and Wolff Added.

26.39 Heilbron[n], 1883. Added.

82.38 [(]_Power of Numbers_ Removed.

112.5 and perhaps to[o] hasty Added.

133.41 [e]ven less of a critic “in his heart” Restored.

138.23 as little more than a boy[./,] Replaced.

133.42 [th]an Cousin. Restored.

149.34 the old notion back again[,/.] Replaced.

150.23 by her eighteenth-century writers[.] Added.

201.34 It is wi[s/d]ely usual Replaced.

234.29 ii. 91[)] Removed.

243.9 “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney[”] Added.

272.25 one of the least agree[e]able Removed.

296.11 but in politics ecc[l]esiastical and civil Inserted.

320.18 the whole twelvemo[u/n]th Replaced.

357.40 the so-called “British[’/”] or Miltonic Replaced. scansion

378.11 as Dryden’s or Corneill[l]e’s. Removed.

394.6 rule the ro[a/o]st so absolutely Replaced.

401.21 “judging of books[”] Added.

449.27 a very useful alter[n]ative Inserted.

496.28 his strictly critical facul[i]ties Removed.

558.37 in a newspaper[.] Added.

567.36 [“]Über Urtheil, Kritik, Beifall und Ruhren,” Added.

617.47 for his grandsire or his dam[.] Added.