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incapacity as a critic of poets, but must at present stop. We have ventured on these remarks from no personal feeling to the author; in fact, although we have spoken of him as living, we are not sure but he is dead. To detract from his fame as a scholar and a historian, or rather critic on history, were a hopeless and an unjust attempt. But we are sorry to see powers so efficient in other fields worse than wasted upon the sides of Parnassus. To warn him and such as he off that sacred and secluded territory, we shall ever regard as our bounden duty.

NO. II-JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE.

OUR foregoing paper is on Hallam and Hazlitt. Our next is on two men who also constitute types of our two main modern schools of criticism-namely, the Mechanical and the Impulsive-although in both of them there are other elements blended Jeffrey, much more than Hallam, having the genial playing above the hard surface of his mechanical judgment; and Coleridge, much more than Hazlitt, having a philosophical basis established below his impulsive eloquence of thought.

We first saw Lord Jeffrey at a meeting held in Edinburgh, to erect a monument to the memory of Sir Walter Scott, then recently deceased. After the poor Duke of Buccleuch, who acted as chairman, had delivered a silly speech in a hammering-stammering style (one of his best sentences was, "As to Scott's poetry, where was there ever anything like that?"), up rose our elegant, refined, little Law-Lord, and began in a shrill, sharp, yet tremulous tone, to panegyrise the memory of his most formidable Scottish rival. His remarks were brief and in beautiful taste, especially when he spoke of men of all politics and classes having entered that hall, "as if into the Temple of the Deity," to perform an act of common and catholic homage to the virtues and genius of Sir Walter Scott. We were too distant to see his features distinctly, but shall never forget the impression made on us by his piercing rapid

tones, and by the mingled dexterity and dignity of the style of his address.

This was the first and last time of our hearing or seeing Jeffrey. But for years before we had been familiar with his fascinating articles in the "Edinburgh Review"-articles which now exert on us only the shadow of their original spell. Certainly more graceful and lively productions are not to be found in the compass of criticism; but in depth, power, width, and, above all, truth, they must take, on the whole, a secondary rank.

Lord Jeffrey had, unquestionably, many of the elements which unite to form a genuine critic. He had a subtle perception of a certain class of intellectual and literary beauties. He had a generous sympathy with many forms of genius. He had a keen logic with which to defend his views-a lively wit, a fine fancy, and a rapid, varied eloquence with which to expound and illustrate them. There was about his writing, too, a certain inimitable ease, which looked at first like carelessness, but which on closer inspection turned out to be the compounded result of high culture, much intercourse with the best society, and much practice in public speaking. His knowledge of law, too, had whetted his natural acuteness to a razor-like sharpness. His learning was not, perhaps, massive or profound; but his reading had been very extensive, and, retained in its entireness, became exceedingly serviceable to him in all his mental efforts. His genius possessed great versatility, and had been fed with very various provision, so that he was equally fitted to grapple with certain kinds of philosophy, and to discourse on certain schools of poetry, and was familiar alike with law, literature, metaphysics, and history. The moral spirit of his writings was that of a gentleman and man of the world, who was at all times ready to trample on meanness, and to resent every injury done to the common codes of honor, decency, generosity, and external morality.

Such is, we think, a somewhat comprehensive list of the good properties of Jeffrey as a critic. But he labored not less certainly under various important defects, which we proceed now with all candor to notice. He was not, in the first place, although a subtle and acute, a profound or comprehensive thinker. He saw the edges of a thought, but not a

thought in its length, depth, breadth, and in its relation to any great scheme of principles. Hence, with all his logical fence, and clear, rapid induction of particulars, he is often a shallow, and seldom a satisfactory thinker. He seems constantly, by a tentative process, seeking for his theories, seldom coming down upon them from the high summit of philosophical views. He has very few deep glimpses of truth, and scarcely any aphoristic sentences. His language, rhetoric, and fancy are often felt to be rich; his vein of thought seldom if ever-it is diffused in long strata, not concentrated into solid masses. He had no nuggets in his mines! Hence he is far from being a suggestive writer. Compare him in this respect with Burke, with Coleridge, with Foster! We are not blaming him for not having been one of these men; we are merely thus severely defining what we think the exact limits, and measuring the proper proportions, of his mind.

Although possessed of much and brilliant fancy, he had no high imagination, and therefore little true sympathy with it. The critic of the first poets must be himself potentially a poet. To see the sun, implics only eyes; but to sing the sun aright, implies a spark of his fire in the singer's soul. Jeffrey saw Milton, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and the writers of the Bible, but he could not sing their glories. Indeed, in reference to the first three and the last of these mighty poets, he has never, so far as we remember, uttered one word, or at least shown any thorough or profound appreciation of their power. Who quotes his panegyrics on Milton and Dante, if such things there be? Where has he spoken of Isaiah, David, or Job? Shakspeare, indeed, he has often and gracefully praised; but it is the myriad-minded in undress that he loves, and not as he is bound up to the full pitch of his transcendent genius-he likes him better as the Shakspeare of "Romeo," and the "Midsummer Night's Dream," than as the Shakspeare of "Macbeth," "Lear," and "Hamlet;" and his remarks, eloquent though they are, show no such knowledge of him as is manifested by Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Lamb. Almost all the great original poets of his own time he has either underrated, or attacked, or passed over in silence. Think of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley! Many of the best English writers of the past are treated with indifference or neglect. Burke

he only mentions once or twice. Johnson he sometimes sneers at, and sometimes patronises. To swift as a writer he has done gross injustice. Sir Thomas Browne seems unknown to him. Young of the "Night Thoughts," Thomson, and Cowper, are all underrated. To Jeremy Taylor, indeed, he has given his due meed of praise, and to the early English dramatists much more than their due. And who, on the other hand, are his special favorites? Pope he admired for his brilliant wit and polish; Crabbe for his terseness and truth; Moore for his light and airy fancy; Campbell for his classic energy and national spirit; and Byron, not for the awful horn of blasphemy and creative power which rose late on his forehead in “ Cain," "Heaven and Earth," and the "Vision of Judgment," but for his "Giaours" and "Corsairs," and the other clever centos of that imitative period of his poetical life. In praising these writers he was so far right, but he was not right in exalting them above their greater contemporaries; and the fact that he did so, simply shows that there was in his own mind a certain vital imaginative deficiency, disqualifying him from criticising the highest specimens of the art of poetry. What would we think of a critic on the fine arts, who should prefer Flaxman to Angelo, or Reynolds to Raphael, or Danby to Leonardo da Vinci ?

In connection with this want of high imagination, there was in Jeffrey a want of abandonment and enthusiasm: of false enthusiasm he was incapable, although he was sometimes deceived by it in others. But the genuine child-like ardor which leads a man to clap his hands or to weep aloud as he sees some beautiful landscape, or reads some noble passage of poetry or prose, if it ever was in him, was early frozen up by the influences of the society with which he mingled in his early days. We disagree with Thomas Carlyle in many, and these very momentous, things-but we thoroughly agree with him in his judgment of the mischief which logic and speculation wrought upon the brains and hearts of the Scottish lawyers and literati about the end of last century and the beginning of this. We have heard of him saying, "that when in Edinburgh, if he had not thought there were some better people somewhere in the world than those he met with there, he would have gone away and hanged himself. The best he met were Whig lawyers, and

they believed in nothing except what they saw!' Among this class Jeffrey was reared, and it was no wonder that the wings of his enthusiasm, which were never of eagle breadth, were sadly curtailed. Indeed the marvel is, that they were not torn away by the roots, and that he has indited certain panegyrics on certain favorite authors, which, if cold, resemble at least cold cast, as we see sometimes in frost-work, into the form of fire.

What a propensity to sneer there was, especially in his earlier writings! Stab he could not-at least, in the dark. He left that Italian task to another and more malignant spirit, of whom THIS "world is not worthy," and who, maugre Jeffrey's kind interference to prevent him, often dipped his stiletto in poison-the poison of his own fierce passions. But Jeffrey's sneers were early as formidable as his coaajutor's stabs. They were so light, and apparently gentle! The sneer at a distance might almost have been mistaken for an infant smile; and yet how thoroughly it did its work! It was as though the shadow of poison could kill. It was fortunate that alike good sense and generosity taught him in general to reserve his power of sarcasm for those whom it might annoy and even check in popularity, but could not harm in person or in purse. Jeffrey flew at noble game-at Scott, and Southey, and Wordsworth. This doubtless was done in part from the levity and persiflage characteristic of an aspiring Edinburgh youth.Truly does the writer quoted in the last paragraph say, that there is "a certain age when all young men should be clapped into barrels, and so kept till they come to years of discretion' —so intolerable is their conceit, and so absurd their projects and hopes-especially when to a large quantum of impudence and a minimum of true enthusiasm they add only that "little learning" which is so common and so dangerous a thing in this our day. Jeffrey, although rising ineffably above the wretched young prigs and pretenders of his own or the present time, was seldom entirely free from the spirit of intellectual puppyism. There was a pertness about his general manner of writing. Amazingly clever, adroit, subtle--he always gave you the impression of smallness; and you fancied that you saw Wordsworth, while still smarting under his arrows, lifting him up in his hand, as did Gulliver a Lilliputian, and admir

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