ing the finished proportions of his tiny antagonist. And yet how, with his needle-like missiles, did he shed round pain and consternation upon the mightiest of the land! How did James Montgomery, and William Godwin, and Coleridge, and Lamb, and Southey, and a hundred more of mark and likeli hood, groan like the wounded Cyclops--and how they reeled and staggered when they felt themselves blinded by weapons which they despised, and victimised by an enemy they previously could hardly see!

Latterly, indeed, we notice in Jeffrey's style less of the mannikin, and more of the man-less of the captious criticaster, and more of the large-minded judge. His paper on Byron's Tragedies is a specimen of his better manner, being bold and masculine; and it does not seem, like many of his articles, as if it should have been written on a watch-paper. In treating Warburton, too, he gets up on tiptoe, in sympathy with the bulky bishop; nor does he lose either his dignity of balance in the effort. But his attack on Swift is by far his most powerful review. We demur to his estimate of his talents as a writer. Swift could have swallowed a hundred Jeffreys. His power was simple and strong, as one of the energies of Nature. He did by the moving of his finger what others could not by the straining and agitation of their whole frame. It was a stripped, concentred, irresistible force which dwelt in him-fed, too, by unutterable misery; and hence his power, and hence his pollution. He was strong, naked, coarse, savage, and mud-loving, as one of the huge primeval creatures of chaos. Jeffrey's sense of polish, feeling of elegance and propriety, consciousness of inferiority in most things, and consciousness of superiority in some, all contributed to rouse his ire at Swift; and, unequal as on the whole the match was, the clever Scotchman beat the monster Paddy. One is reminded of Gulliver's contest with some of the gigantic reptiles and wasps of Brobdignag. Armed with his hanger, that redoubtable traveler made them resile, or sent them wounded away. And thus the memory of Swift bears Jeffrey's steel-mark on it, and shall bear it for ever.

And yet, although Jeffrey was capable of high moral indig nation, he appears to have had very little religious suscepti bility. He was one of those who seem never either to have

heartily hated or heartily loved religion. He had thought on the subject; but only as he had thought on the guilt of Mary Queen of Scots-as an interesting historical puzzle, and not as a question deeply affecting his own heart and personal interests. We find in his writings no sympathy with the high heroic faith, the dauntless resistance, and the long-continued sufferings of the religious confessors and Covenanters of his own country. He could lay indeed a withering touch on their enemies; but them he passed by in silence, or acknowledged only by sneers. In this respect, however, as well as in his literary tone and temper, we notice a decided improvement in his latter days. He who, in an carly number of the "Edinburgh Review," applied a dancing-master standard to brawny Burns, and would have shorn and scented him down to the standard of Edinburgh modish life, in a diary written a little before his death, calls him a "glorious being," and wishes he had been contemporary with him, that he might have called at his Dumfries hovel, and comforted his unhappy spirit. And he who had sneered, times and ways without number, at Scottish Presbyterian religion, actually shed tears when he saw the Free Church party leaving the General Assembly to cast themselves on the Voluntary Principle; and said that no country but Scotland could have exhibited a spectacle so morally sublime. In both these respects, indeed, latterly, the re-action becomes so complete as to be rather ludicrous than edifying. Think of how, in his letters, he deals with Dickens; how he kisses and fondles him as a lady does her lap-dog; how he weeps instead of laughing over those miserable Christmas tales of his; how he seems to believe a pug of genius to be a very lion! How different had Dickens's worse productions appeared in the earlier part of Jeffrey's critical career! As to religion, his tone becomes that of childish sentimentalism; and, unable to the last to give either to the Bible or to the existence of God the homage of a manly belief, he can yet shed over them floods of silly and senile tears.

Yet let him have his praise, as one of the acutest, most fluent, lively, and on the whole amiable, of our modern Scottish celebrities; although not, as Cockburn calls him in that lamentable life of his, at which the public have scarcely yet ceased to laugh, "the first of British critics!!!" His fame,

except in Edinburgh, is fast dwindling away; and although some passages in his writings may long be quoted, his memory is sure of preservation, chiefly from the connection of his name with that of the "Edinburgh Review," and with those powerful but uncertain influences in literature, politics, philosophy, and religion, which that review once wielded.

Coleridge was a man of another order. Indeed, we are half tempted to unite with De Quincey in calling him the "largest and most spacious intellect that has hitherto existed among men." All men, of course, compared with God, are fragments. Shakspeare himself was, and so was Coleridge. But, of all men of his time (Goethe not excepted), Coleridge approached nearest to our conception of a whole; and it was his own fault principally that he did not approach to this as nearly as Shakspeare. He had, as he boasted of himself, "energic reason and a shaping mind." He had imagination, intellect, reason, logic, fancy, and a hundred other faculties, all developed in nearly equal proportions, and all cultivated to nearly the same degree. He had, besides, a high and solemn sense of God, and a firm belief in his personality. Such powers were united with all the mechanical gifts of language and musical utterance, which tend to make them influential on the general public, and with a fine bodily constitution. What then was wanting to this new Adam, thus endowed in the prodigality of heaven? Only two things-a will and a wife—or, more properly speaking, one-a wife who could have become a will to him, and who could have led him to labor, regularity, and virtue. No such blessing was conferred on poor Coleridge. His "pensive Sara" failed, without any positive fault on her side, but from mere non-adaptation, in managing her gifted lord. And thus, left to his own rudderless impulses, he drifted on in a half-drunken dream, till he neared the rocks of ruin; and only at the call of Cottle and Southey turned round, in time to save a fraction of his intellect, of his character, and of his peace. Infinite and eternal regrets must hover above the record which tells of the history of Coleridge; the more as he neither fully went down, nor fully escaped the Maelstrom; in either of which cases, his fate had been more instructive and even less mysterious than it now is.

Yet we must here emphatically protest against Carlyle's re

cent attempt to depreciate Coleridge. It is altogether un worthy of the author of the "Life of Schiller," although infinitely worthy of the author of the "Model Prisons"-that wretched inhumanity, which seemed like Swift's last ghastly grin gone astray, and re-appearing on the lips of Sartor.Coleridge, it seems, had nothing but "beautiful philosophic moonshine." Better surely philosophic moonshine than "philosophic reck." Better try by moonshine to calm or brighten the jarring waves of this troubled age, than to darken them by a mist of jargon, or churn them into wilder fury by expletives of blasphemy. Coleridge, we admit, did not fully accomplish the task he undertook; but it was a task, and a task of heroic daring-better and nobler certainly than the act of lying down in the path of the world, and uttering howls of despair and furious invectives-invectives and exclamations which were endured for awhile, for the sake of their music and poetry; but which, having outlived that poetry and that music, are now very generally and justly regarded as the outcries of one who, naturally a noble being, has been partly soured and partly spoiled into something we can hardly venture to describe, except that it is rabidly hopeless, and hopelessly rabid. Alas! alas! for the Carlyle of 1829, when the article on Burns appeared

"If thou beest he; but oh! how fallen, how changed!"

It is not our purpose to enter on the mare magnum of the Coleridgean question as a whole; but to speak simply and shortly of him in his critical function and faculty. That partook of the vast enlargement and varied culture of his mind. He arose at a time when criticism had fallen as low as poetry. Hayley was then the leading poet, and Blair the ruling critic! The Edinburgh Review" had not risen, when a dark-haired man, "more fat than bard beseems," with ivory forehead, misty eye, boundless appetite for Welsh mutton, turnips, and flip, "talking like an angel, and doing nothing at all," commenced to talk and lecture on poetry all along the Bristol Channel-in Shropshire and in Shrewsbury, in Manchester and in Birmingham; and so new and striking were his views, and so eloquent his language, and so native his enthusiasm, that

all men's hearts burned within them as he spoke. He "threw," says Hazlitt, "a great stone into the torpid and stagnant waters of criticism." He set up Shakspeare above Pope; he praised Thomson and Cowper, as vastly superior to even Addison and Goldsmith; he magnified Collins over Gray; he asserted the immeasurable superiority of Burke to all his contemporaries; he turned attention to the ancient ballad poetry of Britain; and he pointed his finger toward the great orb of German genius which was then rising slowly, and amid heavy clouds, over the horizon of the British mind. He did more than this: he made his audiences for the first time hear poetry read, not with the disgusting tricks of such elocution as was then, and is still taught, but as poets should read it, and as lovers of poetry should desire it to be read. And the poetry he did read was sometimes his own-the fine fresh incense of his young enthusiasm and insight, colored by the hues of heaven as it ascended up on high.

The effect he produced was greatly increased afterwards, by the influences of a visit to Germany upon his mind and his eloquence. This, instead of deadening, simply directed the current of his enthusiasm. It made him a wise enthusiast.He could now substantiate his statements, made at first from intuitons, by critical principles, which were, indeed, just intuitions grown old and established. He had greatly profited by reading Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, and he set himself to translate them, in various ways, to his countrymen. It mattered ot though his works did not circulate; he circulated, and wherever he went intellectual virtue went out of him He scattered critical dust-and it was fire-dust-along his path; and such men as Lamb, and Hazlitt, and Southey, and De Quincey, and Lloyd, were ever ready to collect it, and to make it, and perhaps sometimes to call it, their own. For several years, in fact, the controversy of criticism amounted to a brisk fire between the "Edinburgh Review," stationary in the metropolis of Scotland, and S. T. Coleridge, wandering at his own will through merry England, from London to the Lakes, and from the Lakes to Bristol, or to London back again. At the outset, the "Review" had the advantage; but ultimately Coleridge, Wordsworth, and their party talked and wrote its criticism down-nay, best of all, converted the "Review" to their side, though never fully to themselves.