Note note 2 — VOLUME III.

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.

544. Southern afterwards came in contact with Borrow at Madrid. See The Bible in Spain and Dr Knapp’s Life.

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.

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.

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

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.

549. V. sup., ii. 534.

550. His best literary skit, “Bozzy and Piozzi,” deals with the Tour, not the Life.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

560. On the same page, ed. cit.

561. Who loved the Vulgate.

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.

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.

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.