whole. It explains why he wished Lockhart to edit the others. It
explains at the same time why (for the Shepherd's vanity was never far
off) he set apparently little store by the book. It is only a hypothesis
of course, and a hypothesis which is very unlikely ever to be proved,
while in the nature of things it is even less capable of disproof. But I
think there is good critical reason for it.

At any rate, I confess for myself, that I should not take anything like
the same interest in Hogg, if he were not the putative author of the
_Confessions_. The book is in a style which wearies soon if it be
overdone, and which is very difficult indeed to do well. But it is one
of the very best things of its kind, and that is a claim which ought
never to be overlooked. And if Hogg in some lucky moment did really
"write it all by himself," as the children say, then we could make up
for him a volume composed of it, of "Kilmeny," and of the best of the
songs, which would be a very remarkable volume indeed. It would not
represent a twentieth part of his collected work, and it would probably
represent a still smaller fraction of what he wrote, while all the rest
would be vastly inferior. But it would be a title to no inconsiderable
place in literature, and we know that good judges did think Hogg, with
all his personal weakness and all his literary shortcomings, entitled to
such a place.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] For something more, however, see the Essay on Lockhart below.

SYDNEY SMITH

The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds
still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case
against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would
certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
and that the brilliant virulence of _Peter Plymley_, the even greater
brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the _Letters to
Archdeacon Singleton_, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
_Edinburgh Review_, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney[8] to be what Fuseli
pronounced Blake, "d----d good to steal from." But the _Life_ which
Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
popularity seems to have been secured by another _Life_, published by
Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
but from his _Life_ or _Lives_. No one with any sense of fun can read
the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
his party was out, and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
less.

He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
"Bobus," who co-operated in the _Microcosm_ with Canning and Frere,
survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and Cecil
the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
sufficient divine, it obviously was not quite the profession for him.
He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
did take orders; and the later _Life_ gives more particulars than the
first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.

The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
the aimless prolongation of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
usefully spent even before that invention of the _Review_, over which
there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
settlements, as Jeffrey's own.[9] Sydney's settlement on his wife is
well known: it consisted of "six small silver teaspoons much worn," with
which worldly goods he did her literally endow by throwing them into her
lap. It would appear that there never was a happier marriage; but it
certainly seemed for some years as if there might have been many more
prosperous in point of money. When Sydney moved to London he had no
very definite prospect of any income whatever; and had not Mrs. Smith
sold her mother's jewels (which came to her just at the time), they
would apparently have had some difficulty in furnishing their house in
Doughty Street. But Horner, their friend (the "parish bull" of Scott's
irreverent comparison), had gone to London before them, and impressed
himself, apparently by sheer gravity, on the political world as a good
young man. Introduced by him, Sydney Smith soon became one of the circle
at Holland House. It is indeed not easy to live on invitations and your
mother-in-law's pearls; but Sydney reviewed vigorously, preached
occasionally, before very long received a regular appointment at the
Foundling Hospital, and made some money by lecturing very agreeably at
the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy--a subject of which he
honestly admits that he knew, in the technical sense, nothing. But his
hearers did not want technical ethics, and in Sydney Smith they had a
moral philosopher of the practical kind who could hardly be excelled
either in sense or in wit. One little incident of this time, however,
throws some light on the complaints which have been made about the delay
of his promotion. He applied to a London rector to license him to a
vacant chapel, which had not hitherto been used for the services of the
Church. The immediate answer has not been preserved; but from what
followed it clearly was a civil and rather evasive but perfectly
intelligible request to be excused. The man was of course quite within
his right, and a dozen good reasons can be guessed for his conduct. He
may really have objected, as he seems to have said he did, to take a
step which his predecessors had refused to take, and which might
inconvenience his successors. But Sydney would not take the refusal, and
wrote another very logical, but extremely injudicious, letter pressing
his request with much elaboration, and begging the worthy Doctor of
Divinity to observe that he, the Doctor, was guilty of inconsistency and
other faults. Naturally this put the Doctor's back up, and he now
replied with a flat and very high and mighty refusal. We know from
another instance that Sydney was indisposed to take "No" for an answer.
However he obtained, besides his place at the Foundling, preacherships
in two proprietary chapels, and seems to have had both business and
pleasure enough on his hands during his London sojourn, which was about
the same length as his Edinburgh one. It was, however, much more
profitable, for in three years the ministry of "All the Talents" came
in, the Holland House interest was exerted, and the Chancellor's living
of Foston, near York, valued at five hundred pounds a year, was given to
Sydney. He paid for it, after a fashion which in a less zealous and
convinced Whig might seem a little dubious, by the famous lampoons of
the _Plymley Letters_, advocating the claims of Catholic emancipation,
and extolling Fox and Grenville at the expense of Perceval and Canning.
Very edifying is it to find Sydney Smith objecting to this latter that
he is a "diner out," a "maker of jokes and parodies," a trifler on
important subjects--in fact each and all of the things which the Rev.
Sydney Smith himself was, in a perfection only equalled by the object of
his righteous wrath. But of Peter more presently.

Even his admiring biographers have noticed, with something of a chuckle,
the revenge which Perceval, who was the chief object of Plymley's
sarcasm, took, without in the least knowing it, on his lampooner. Had it
not been for the Clergy Residence Bill, which that very respectable, if
not very brilliant, statesman passed in 1808, and which put an end to
perhaps the most flagrant of all then existing abuses, Sydney, the enemy
of abuses, would no doubt have continued with a perfectly clear
conscience to draw the revenues of Foston, and while serving it by a
curate, to preach, lecture, dine out, and rebuke Canning for making
jokes, in London. As it was he had to make up his mind, though he
obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the
recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange,
which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a
real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable,
and had had no resident clergyman since the seventeenth century. But
whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know
what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen,
and strong political prejudices sometimes made him abuse his talents),
no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
graciously on the strangers, and being whelmed, coach and four,
outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
decay, and carried the family for many years half over England--all
these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
better and at a length too long to quote.

Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
the _Edinburgh Review_, found himself in a minority of one or two among
the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further preferment,
for he held for some years (on the then not discredited understanding of
resignation when one of the Howards was ready for it) the neighbouring
and valuable living of Londesborough. Then the death of an aunt put an
end to his monetary anxieties, which for years had been considerable, by
the legacy of a small but sufficient fortune. And at last, when he was
approaching sixty, the good things of the Church, which he never
affected to despise, came in earnest. The Tory Chancellor Lyndhurst gave
him a stall at Bristol, which carried with it a small Devonshire living,
and soon afterwards he was able to exchange Foston (which he had greatly
improved), for Combe Florey near Taunton. When his friend Lord Grey
became Prime Minister, the stall at Bristol was exchanged for a much
more valuable one at St. Paul's; Halberton, the Devonshire vicarage, and
Combe Florey still remaining his. These made up an ecclesiastical
revenue not far short of three thousand a year, which Sydney enjoyed for
the last fifteen years of his life. He never got anything more, and it
is certain that for a time he was very sore at not being made a bishop,
or at least offered a bishopric. Lord Holland had rather rashly
explained the whole difficulty years before, by reporting a conversation
of his with Lord Grenville, in which they had hoped that when the Whigs
came into power they would be more grateful to Sydney than the Tories
had been to Swift. Sydney's acuteness must have made him wince at the
omen. For my part I do not see why either Harley or Grey should have
hesitated, as far as any scruples of their own went. But I think any
fair-minded person must admit the possibility of a scruple, though he
may not share it, about the effect of seeing either the _Tale of a Tub_
or _Peter Plymley's Letters_, with "By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop
of----" on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might
in each case have been fools: there is nothing that I at least can see,
in either book, inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But
they would have been honest fools, and of such a Prime Minister has to
take heed. So Amen Corner (or rather, for he did not live there, certain
streets near Grosvenor Square) in London, and Combe Florey in the
country, were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he
gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to
do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother
Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,--for he had
either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,--he made on a small
scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
England.

To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches
itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
of half the neighbourhood. It appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguénieff and M.
Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
seventy-fourth year of his age.

The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to him (notably the famous
one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context
can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
rank--Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire--he is most like Voltaire in his
faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first
epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
as "anything but a _polished_ corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
previous Sunday--an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
independent mind, with whom pheasants at least, or perhaps even turkeys,
are necessary;" and scores more with references to which I find the
fly-leaves of my copy of the letters covered. If any one wants to see
how much solid there is with all this froth, let him turn to the
passages showing the unconquerable manliness, fairness, and good sense
with which Sydney treated the unhappy subject of Queen Caroline, out of
which his friends were so ready to make political capital; or to the
admirable epistle in which he takes seriously, and blunts once for all,
the points of certain foolish witticisms as to the readiness with which
he, a man about town, had taken to catechisms and cabbages in an almost
uninhabited part of the despised country. In conversation he would seem
sometimes to have a little, a very little, "forced the note." The Quaker
baby, and the lady "with whom you might give an assembly or populate a
parish," are instances in point. But he never does this in his letters.
I take particular pleasure in the following passage written to Miss
Georgiana Harcourt within two years of his death: "What a charming
existence! To live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing
profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be
found in the Palace than a snake can exist in Ireland, or ripe fruit in
Scotland! To have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to
bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the
Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some
foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun in
this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes
of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But he was much else.

Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating
Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary
work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on
reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His _Life_
contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such Lives and by no means
always or often furnished) a complete list of his contributions to the
_Edinburgh Review_, and his works contain most of them. To these have to
be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best
are, at intervals of thirty years, _Peter Plymley_ and the _Letters to
Archdeacon Singleton_, together with sermons, speeches, and other
miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not
himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.

Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
he speaks of his own contributions to the _Edinburgh_ with the greatest
freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
ones--the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
blaspheming Madame de Sévigné, but preferring to her that second-rate
leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Staël. On the other hand, if he
had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed
Scott's novels incessantly against the Whigs and prigs of Holland House.
He gives a most well-timed warning to Jeffrey that the constant
running-down of Wordsworth had very much the look of persecution, though
with his usual frankness he avows that he has not read the particular
article in question, because the subject is "quite uninteresting to
him." I think he would, if driven hard, have admitted with equal
frankness that poetry, merely as poetry, was generally uninteresting.
Still he had so many interests of various kinds, that few books failed
to appeal to one or the other, and he, in his turn, has seldom failed to
give a lively if not a very exact or critical account of his subject.
But it is in his way of giving this account that the peculiarity,
glanced at above as making a parallel between him and Voltaire, appears.
It is, I have said, almost original, and what is more, endless as has
been the periodical writing of the last eighty years, and sedulously as
later writers have imitated earlier, I do not know that it has ever
been successfully copied. It consists in giving rapid and apparently
business-like summaries, packed, with apparent negligence and real art,
full of the flashes of wit so often noticed and to be noticed. Such are,
in the article on "The Island of Ceylon," the honey-bird "into whose
body the soul of a common informer seems to have migrated," and "the
chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. Somebody or other
whose name we have forgotten," the discovery of whose body in a serpent
his ruthless clerical brother pronounces to be "the best history of the
kind he remembers." Very likely there may be people who can read this,
even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should
suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten,
who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's
unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting,
"Yes! an _English_ joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did
not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of
summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton.
But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to
this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia
becomes quite furious from the conviction that Cæsario has been sleeping
with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
with a third lady called Amelrosa."

Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous. The medicine
did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the
reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief
of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the
Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English
prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of
slavery, and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation.
With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving
him an interest therein. Prisons were another favourite subject, though,
in his zeal for making them uncomfortable, he committed himself to one
really atrocious suggestion--that of dark cells for long periods of
time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical
proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about
man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of
torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing
that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go
there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr.
Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The
greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the
article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the
apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a
series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous
"Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been
or can be said on the Liberal side in the lighter manner. It has not
lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time
changed his party, and has elaborated for himself, after his manner, a
similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favour of the very things
for which Sydney was fighting.

The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous
essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith,
unlike Sterne, never condescended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in
the pulpit. In _Peter Plymley's Letters_ they appear concentrated and
acidulated: in the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_, in the
_Repudiation Letters_, and the _Letters on Railways_ which date from his
very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has
been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of
his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case.
Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was
never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of
commentators, he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did
not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as
his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his
increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life,
by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right
atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. _Plymley_, though very
amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not
glaringly unfair for a political lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and
almost (as "almost" as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to
read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out
of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear
of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main
argument, moreover, is bad in itself, and was refuted by facts. Sydney
pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest
the French should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen
and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The
Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall _not_
land, and that Irishmen shall _not_ rise." And they did take the said
good care, and they beat the Frenchmen thorough and thorough while
Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though
much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully
successful as a whole. In the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_ the tone
is almost uniformly good-humoured, and the argument, whether quite
consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely
sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best
friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before
referred to.

    I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage
    so apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too
    light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There
    was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the
    chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of
    the translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the
    town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of
    the State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse,
    the Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of
    Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick
    of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John
    Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops,
    Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed
    with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture
    were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many
    propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my
    Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in
    which was great store of good things--and among the rest a
    roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners
    of the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured
    the Church--and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was
    seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished,
    a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were
    gathered under the windows, cried out _Bread! bread!_ for there
    was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the
    ordinary price of the _sleich_; and when they had done crying
    _Bread! bread!_ they called out _No Bishops!_ and began to cast
    up stones at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a
    great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease
    the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did
    devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have
    seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully
    at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with
    Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, _Good my Lords,
    is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who
    count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster?
    Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons which is
    making ready for them in the chamber below._ And this speech of
    Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent
    for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the
    public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the
    dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went
    away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town,
    because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the
    Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
    pleasant conceit, _and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
    and had ding'd the Canons well_."

Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there are some little lapses of
the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
up.

It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared
to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
epigram), he had the sturdiest possible common sense and the liveliest
possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous
people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted--indeed (as his famous and
constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than any man who ever
lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
off when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
"anility" (a favourite word of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
householder.

But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's _Life_,
and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
_Peter Plymley_ to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
sore, at not receiving the preferment which he thought he had deserved,
he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
schools and universities, who even, though he may not like spring-guns
much, thinks that John Jones had only himself to blame if, after ample
warning and with no business except the business of supplying a London
poulterer with his landlord's game, he trespassed and came to the worst.
Yet even this monster, if he happened to be possessed of the sense of
fun and literature, (which is perhaps impossible), could not read even
the most acrid of Sydney's political diatribes without shrieking with
laughter, if, in his ogreish way, he were given to such violent
demonstrations; could certainly not read the _Life_ and the letters
without admitting, in a moment of unwonted humanity, that here was a man
who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom
as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very
few equals.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] To speak of him in this way is not impertinence or familiarity. He
was most generally addressed as "Mr. Sydney," and his references to his
wife are nearly always to "Mrs. Sydney," seldom or never to "Mrs.
Smith."

[9] See next Essay.

IV

JEFFREY

"Jeffrey and I," says Christopher North in one of his more malicious
moments, "do nothing original; it's porter's work." A tolerably
experienced student of human nature might almost, without knowing the
facts, guess the amount of truth contained in this fling. North, as
North, had done nothing that the world calls original: North, as Wilson,
had done a by no means inconsiderable quantity of such work in verse and
prose. But Jeffrey really did underlie the accusation contained in the
words. A great name in literature, nothing stands to his credit in
permanent literary record but a volume (a sufficiently big one, no
doubt[10]) of criticisms on the work of other men; and though this
volume is only a selection from his actual writings, no further gleaning
could be made of any different material. Even his celebrated, or once
celebrated, "Treatise on Beauty" is but a review article, worked up into
an encyclopædia article, and dealing almost wholly with pure criticism.
Against him, if against any one, the famous and constantly repeated gibe
about the fellows who have failed in literature and art, falls short and
harmless. In another of its forms, "the corruption of a poet is the
generation of a critic," it might be more appropriate. For Jeffrey, as
we know from his boyish letters, once thought, like almost every boy who
is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.

His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
of the Court of Session, and respectably, though not brilliantly,
connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
to a kind of studious independence, attending only a couple of law
classes at Edinburgh University. Then his father insisted on his going
to Oxford: a curious step, the reasons for which are anything but clear.
For the paternal idea seems to have been that Jeffrey was to study not
arts, but law; a study for which Oxford may present facilities now, but
which most certainly was quite out of its way in Jeffrey's time, and
especially in the case of a Scotch boy of ordinary freshman's age.

It is painful to have to say that Jeffrey hated Oxford, because there
are few instances on record in which such hatred does not show the hater
to have been a very bad man indeed. There are, however, some special
excuses for the little Scotchman. His college (Queen's) was not perhaps
very happily selected; he had been sent there in the teeth of his own
will, which was a pretty strong will; he was horrified, after the free
selection of Scotch classes, to find a regular curriculum which he had
to take or leave as a whole; the priggishness of Oxford was not his
priggishness, its amusements (for he hated sport of every kind) were not
his amusements; and, in short, there was a general incompatibility. He
came up in September and went down in July, having done nothing except
having, according to a not ill-natured jest, "lost the broad Scotch, but
gained only the narrow English,"--a peculiarity which sometimes brought
a little mild ridicule on him both from Scotchmen and Englishmen.

Very soon after his return to Edinburgh, he seems to have settled down
steadily to study for the Scotch bar, and during his studies
distinguished himself as a member of the famous Speculative Society,
both in essay-writing and in the debates. He was called on 16th December
1794.

Although there have never been very quick returns at the bar, either of
England or Scotland, the smaller numbers of the latter might be thought
likely to bring young men of talent earlier to the front. This
advantage, however, appears to have been counterbalanced partly by the
strong family interests which made a kind of aristocracy among Scotch
lawyers, and partly by the influence of politics and of Government
patronage. Jeffrey was, comparatively speaking, a "kinless loon"; and,
while he was steadily resolved not to put himself forward as a candidate
for the Tory manna of which Dundas was the Moses, his filial reverence
long prevented him from declaring himself a very violent Whig. Indeed,
he gave an instance of this reverence which might serve as a pretty text
for a casuistical discussion. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of
Advocates, was in 1796 deprived by vote of that, the most honourable
position of the Scotch bar, for having presided at a Whig meeting.
Jeffrey, like Gibbon, sighed as a Whig, but obeyed as a son, and stayed
away from the poll. His days were certainly long in the land; but I am
inclined to think that, in a parallel case, some Tories at least would
have taken the chance of shorter life with less speckled honour.
However, it is hard to quarrel with a man for obeying his parents; and
perhaps, after all, the Whigs did not think the matter of so much
importance as they affected to do. It is certain that Jeffrey was a
little dashed by the slowness of his success at the bar. Towards the end
of 1798, he set out for London with a budget of letters of introduction,
and thoughts of settling down to literature. But the editors and
publishers to whom he was introduced did not know what a treasure lay
underneath the scanty surface of this Scotch advocate, and they were
either inaccessible or repulsive. He returned to Edinburgh, and, for
another two years, waited for fortune philosophically enough, though
with lingering thoughts of England, and growing ones of India. It was
just at the turn of the century, that his fortunes began, in various
ways, also to take a turn. For some years, though a person by no means
given to miscellaneous acquaintances, he had been slowly forming the
remarkable circle of friends from whose combined brains was soon to
start the _Edinburgh Review_. He fell in love, and married his second
cousin, Catherine Wilson, on 1st November 1801--a bold and by no means
canny step, for his father was ill-off, the bride was tocherless, and he
says that he had never earned a hundred pounds a year in fees. They did
not, however, launch out greatly, and their house in Buccleuch Place
(not the least famous locality in literature) was furnished on a scale
which some modern colleges, conducted on the principles of enforced
economy, would think Spartan for an undergraduate. Shortly afterwards,
and very little before the appearance of the Blue and Yellow, Jeffrey
made another innovation, which was perhaps not less profitable to him,
by establishing a practice in ecclesiastical causes; though he met with
a professional check in his rejection, on party principles, for the
so-called collectorship, a kind of reporter's post of some emolument and
not inconsiderable distinction.

The story of the _Edinburgh Review_ and its foundation has been very
often told on the humorous, if not exactly historical, authority of
Sydney Smith. It is unnecessary to repeat it. It is undoubted that the
idea was Sydney's. It is equally undoubted that, but for Jeffrey, the
said idea might never have taken form at all, and would never have
retained any form for more than a few months. It was only Jeffrey's
long-established habit of critical writing, the untiring energy into
which he whipped up his no doubt gifted but quite untrained
contributors, and the skill which he almost at once developed in editing
proper,--that is to say in selecting, arranging, adapting, and, even to
some extent, re-writing contributions--which secured success. Very
different opinions have been expressed at different times on the
intrinsic merits of this celebrated production; and perhaps, on the
whole, the principal feeling of explorers into the long and dusty
ranges of its early volumes, has been one of disappointment. I believe
myself that, in similar cases, a similar result is very common indeed,
and that it is due to the operation of two familiar fallacies. The one
is the delusion as to the products of former times being necessarily
better than those of the present; a delusion which is not the less
deluding because of its counterpart, the delusion about progress. The
other is a more peculiar and subtle one. I shall not go so far as a very
experienced journalist who once said to me commiseratingly, "My good
sir, I won't exactly say that literary merit hurts a newspaper." But
there is no doubt that all the great successes of journalism, for the
last hundred years, have been much more due to the fact of the new
venture being new, of its supplying something that the public wanted and
had not got, than to the fact of the supply being extraordinarily good
in kind. In nearly every case, the intrinsic merit has improved as the
thing went on, but it has ceased to be a novel merit. Nothing would be
easier than to show that the early _Edinburgh_ articles were very far
from perfect. Of Jeffrey we shall speak presently, and there is no doubt
that Sydney at his best was, and is always, delightful. But the
blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of
whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful
Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch
professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The _Review_ never had any one who
could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the _Edinburgh_
maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
_Edinburgh_, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
orders, wrote without interest and without vigour, and were quite
content to earn the smallest pittance. The _Edinburgh_ started from the
first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.

From being, but for his private studies, rather an idle person, Jeffrey
became an extremely busy one. The _Review_ gave him not a little
occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
given to company as he had been in his early youth to solitude, for the
partial breaking up of the circle of friends--Allen, Horner, Smith,
Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour--in which he had previously mixed. In the
same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
the date last mentioned, he met with two afflictions peculiarly trying
to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
the planning and producing of the _Quarterly Review, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers_, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic (he was a very bad sailor) in a
sailing ship, in winter, and in time of war, to fetch his bride. Nor had
he long been married before he took the celebrated country house of
Craigcrook, where, for more than thirty years, he spent all the spare
time of an exceedingly happy life. Then we may jump some fifteen years
to the great Reform contest which gave Jeffrey the reward, such as it
was, of his long constancy in opposition, in the shape of the Lord
Advocateship. He was not always successful as a debater; but he had the
opportunity of adding a third reputation to those which he had already
gained in literature and in law. He had the historical duty of piloting
the Scotch Reform Bill through Parliament, and he had the, in his case,
pleasurable and honourable pain of taking the official steps in
Parliament necessitated by the mental incapacity of Sir Walter Scott.
Early in 1834 he was provided for by promotion to the Scotch Bench. He
had five years before, on being appointed Dean of Faculty, given up the
editorship of the _Review_, which he had held for seven-and-twenty
years. For some time previous to his resignation, his own contributions,
which in early days had run up to half a dozen in a single number, and
had averaged two or three for more than twenty years, had become more
and more intermittent. After that resignation he contributed two or
three articles at very long intervals. He was perhaps more lavish of
advice than he need have been to Macvey Napier, and after Napier's death
it passed into the control of his own son-in-law, Empson. Long, however,
before the reins passed from his own hands, a rival more galling if less
formidable than the _Quarterly_ had arisen in the shape of _Blackwood's
Magazine_. The more ponderous and stately publication always affected,
to some extent, to ignore its audacious junior; and Lord Cockburn
(perhaps instigated not more by prudence than by regard for Lockhart and
Wilson, both of whom were living) passes over in complete silence the
establishment of the magazine, the publication of the Chaldee
manuscript, and the still greater hubbub which arose around the supposed
attacks of Lockhart on Playfair, and the _Edinburgh_ reviewers
generally, with regard to their religious opinions. How deep the
feelings really excited were, may be seen from a letter of Jeffrey's,
published, not by Cockburn, but by Wilson's daughter in the life of her
father. In this Jeffrey practically drums out a new and certainly most
promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
Allen, one of the founders of the _Edinburgh_, and always a kind of
standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French _abbé_ of
the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the _Review_,
including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
ordinary opinion took.

These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
alternating between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
be very sorry to stake his critical reputation upon them, there could
not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
Trade.

In reading Jeffrey's work[11] nowadays, the critical reader finds it
considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
poetry in general, anticipating Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
made him "quite impatient for an opportunity of perusing the whole
poem,"--Romantic surely, quite Romantic. "The tameness and poorness of
the serious style of Addison and Swift,"--Romantic again, quite
Romantic. Yet when we come to Jeffrey's own contemporaries, he
constantly appears as much bewigged and befogged with pseudo-classicism
as M. de Jouy himself. He commits himself, in the year of grace 1829, to
the statement that "the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the
fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth are melting fast from the field of
our vision," while he contrasts with this "rapid withering of the
laurel" the "comparative absence of marks of decay" on Rogers and
Campbell. The poets of his own time whom he praises most heartily, and
with least reserve, are Campbell and Crabbe; and he is quite as
enthusiastic over "Theodric" and "Gertrude" as over the two great
war-pieces of the same author, which are worth a hundred "Gertrudes" and
about ten thousand "Theodrics." Reviewing Scott, not merely when they
were personal friends (they were always that), but when Scott was a
contributor to the _Edinburgh_, and giving general praise to "The Lay,"
he glances with an unmistakable meaning at the "dignity of the subject,"
regrets the "imitation and antiquarian researches," and criticises the
versification in a way which shows that he had not in the least grasped
its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on
Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and
would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of
the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to
forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to
have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic
constantly selects the wrong things as well as the right for
condemnation and ridicule; and in the third, that he would have praised,
or at any rate not blamed, in another, the very things which he blames
in Wordsworth. Even his praise of Crabbe, excessive as it may now
appear, is diversified by curious patches of blame which seem to me at
any rate, singularly uncritical. There are, for instance, a very great
many worse jests in poetry than,

    Oh, had he learnt to make the wig he wears!

--which Jeffrey pronounces a misplaced piece of buffoonery. I cannot
help thinking that if Campbell instead of Southey had written the lines,

    To see brute nature scorn him and renounce
    Its homage to the human form divine,

Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
essays on Mme. de Staël and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of Rylstone" (though I
am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
character, and even in his purely political arguments.

The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is
French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
sympathy, and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in _Peter Simple_ that the
French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
Cevallos article--an ungenerous and pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
patriots, which practically founded the _Quarterly Review_, by finally
disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the _Edinburgh_--was, it
seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
_coup d'état_, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
world in a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
disasters of the country.

In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
Romantic up to a certain point,--the point which he had himself reached
in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of
criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and
familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable
Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The
fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of
"flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour
(his deficiency in which, for all his keen wit, is another Gallic note
in him), he must have seen that the words were ludicrously applicable to
his own condemnation and his own frame of mind. These settings-up of a
wholly arbitrary canon of mere taste, these excommunicatings of such and
such a thing as "low" and "improper," without assigned or assignable
reason, are eminently Gallic. They may be found not merely in the older
school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present
day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of
Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. The critic may be quite
unable to say why _tarte à la crême_ is such a shocking expression, or
even to produce any important authority for the shockingness of it. But
he is quite certain that it is shocking. Jeffrey is but too much given
to protesting against _tarte à la crême_; and the reasons for his error
are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that
is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion,
literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations,
unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a
tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by
a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same
generation, to go shares with any newcomer in literary commerce.

But when these reservations have been made, when his standpoint has been
clearly discovered and marked out, and when some little tricks, such as
the affectation of delivering judgments without appeal, which is still
kept up by a few, though very few, reviewers, have been further allowed
for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a
writer of _causeries_, I do not think he has been surpassed among
Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment.
The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the
books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most
interesting books in literature) the passages and traits, the anecdotes
and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
he was in his own. For the spirit of merely æsthetic criticism, which
was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.

Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
himself more directly and theoretically to literary criticism than
Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of _Essays in
Criticism_.

Let us, as we just now looked through Jeffrey's work to pick out the
less favourable characteristics which distinguish his position, look
through it again to see those qualities which he shares, but in greater
measure than most, with all good critics. The literary essay which
stands first in his collected works is on Madame de Staël. Now that good
lady, of whom some judges in these days do not think very much, was a
kind of goddess on earth in literature, however much she might bore them
in life, to the English Whig party in general; while Jeffrey's French
tastes must have made her, or at least her books, specially attractive
to him. Accordingly he has written a great deal about her, no less than
three essays appearing in the collected works. Writing at least partly
in her lifetime and under the influences just glanced at, he is of
course profuse in compliments. But it is very amusing and highly
instructive to observe how, in the intervals of these compliments, he
contrives to take the good Corinne to pieces, to smash up her ingenious
Perfectibilism, and to put in order her rather rash literary judgments.
It is in connection also with her, that he gives one of the best of not
a few general sketches of the history of literature which his work
contains. Of course there are here, as always, isolated expressions as
to which, however much we admit that Jeffrey was a clever man, we cannot
agree with Jeffrey. He thinks Aristophanes "coarse" and "vulgar" just as
a living pundit thinks him "base," while (though nobody of course can
deny the coarseness) Aristophanes and vulgarity are certainly many miles
asunder. We may protest against the chronological, even more than
against the critical, blunder which couples Cowley and Donne, putting
Donne, moreover, who wrote long before Cowley was born, and differs from
him in genius almost as the author of the _Iliad_ does from the author
of the _Henriade_, second. But hardly anything in English criticism is
better than Jeffrey's discussion of the general French imputation of
"want of taste and politeness" to English and German writers, especially
English. It is a very general, and a very mistaken notion that the
Romantic movement in France has done away with this imputation to a
great extent. On the contrary, though it has long been a kind of
fashion in France to admire Shakespeare, and though since the labours of
MM. Taine and Montégut, the study of English literature generally has
grown and flourished, it is, I believe, the very rarest thing to find a
Frenchman who, in his heart of hearts, does not cling to the old "pearls
in the dung-heap" idea, not merely in reference to Shakespeare, but to
English writers, and especially English humorists, generally. Nothing
can be more admirable than Jeffrey's comments on this matter. They are
especially admirable because they are not made from the point of view of
a _Romantique à tous crins_; because, as has been already pointed out,
he himself is largely penetrated by the very preference for order and
proportion which is at the bottom of the French mistake; and because he
is, therefore, arguing in a tongue understanded of those whom he
censures. Another essay which may be read with especial advantage is
that on Scott's edition of Swift. Here, again, there was a kind of test
subject, and perhaps Jeffrey does not come quite scatheless out of the
trial: to me, at any rate, his account of Swift's political and moral
conduct and character seems both uncritical and unfair. But here, too,
the value of his literary criticism shows itself. He might very easily
have been tempted to extend his injustice from the writer to the
writings, especially since, as has been elsewhere shown, he was by no
means a fanatical admirer of the Augustan age, and thought the serious
style of Addison and Swift tame and poor. It is possible of course, here
also, to find things that seem to be errors, both in the general sketch
which Jeffrey, according to his custom, prefixes, and in the particular
remarks on Swift himself. For instance, to deny fancy to the author of
the _Tale of a Tub_, of _Gulliver_, and of the _Polite Conversation_, is
very odd indeed. But there are few instances of a greater triumph of
sound literary judgment over political and personal prejudice than
Jeffrey's description, not merely of the great works just mentioned (it
is curious, and illustrates his defective appreciation of humour, that
he likes the greatest least, and is positively unjust to the _Tale of a
Tub_), but also of those wonderful pamphlets, articles, lampoons, skits
(libels if any one likes), which proved too strong for the generalship
of Marlborough and the administrative talents of Godolphin; and which
are perhaps the only literary works that ever really changed, for a not
inconsiderable period, the government of England. "Considered," he says,
"with a view to the purposes for which they were intended, they have
probably never been equalled in any period of the world." They certainly
have not; but to find a Whig, and a Whig writing in the very moment of
Tory triumph after Waterloo, ready to admit the fact, is not a trivial
thing. Another excellent example of Jeffrey's strength, by no means
unmixed with examples of his weakness, is to be found in his essays on
Cowper. I have already given some of the weakness: the strength is to be
found in his general description of Cowper's revolt, thought so daring
at the time, now so apparently moderate, against poetic diction. These
instances are to be found under miscellaneous sections, biographical,
historical, and so forth; but the reader will naturally turn to the
considerable divisions headed Poetry and Fiction. Here are the chief
rocks of offence already indicated, and here also are many excellent
things which deserve reading. Here is the remarkable essay, quoted
above, on Campbell's _Specimens_. Here is the criticism of Weber's
edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of
English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did
so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift
style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first
place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's
_Characters of Shakespeare_ (Hazlitt was an _Edinburgh_ reviewer, and
his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece of
generosity on Jeffrey's part towards his wayward contributor) is a
little defaced by a patronising spirit, not, indeed, of that memorably
mistaken kind which induced the famous and unlucky sentence to Macvey
Napier about Carlyle, but something in the spirit of the schoolmaster
who observes, "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much
better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on
Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that
its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious
acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of
Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's
sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal and
unmatchable

    Take him and cut him out in little stars,

with the rest of the passage. But there you have the French spirit. I do
not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth
century (unless perchance it was Gérard de Nerval, and he was not quite
sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little
stars seemed to him puerile and conceited.

Jeffrey's dealings with Byron (I do not now speak of the article on
_Hours of Idleness_, which was simply a just rebuke of really puerile
and conceited rubbish) are not, to me, very satisfactory. The critic
seems, in the rather numerous articles which he has devoted to the
"noble Poet," as they used to call him, to have felt his genius unduly
rebuked by that of his subject. He spends a great deal, and surely an
unnecessarily great deal, of time in solemnly, and no doubt quite
sincerely, rebuking Byron's morality; and in doing so he is sometimes
almost absurd. He calls him "not more obscene perhaps than Dryden or
Prior," which is simply ludicrous, because it is very rare that this
particular word can be applied to Byron at all, while even his
staunchest champion must admit that it applies to glorious John and to
dear Mat Prior. He helps, unconsciously no doubt, to spread the very
contagion which he denounces, by talking about Byron's demoniacal power,
going so far as actually to contrast _Manfred_ with Marlowe to the
advantage of the former. And he is so completely overcome by what he
calls the "dreadful tone of sincerity" of this "puissant spirit," that
he never seems to have had leisure or courage to apply the critical
tests and solvents of which few men have had a greater command. Had he
done so, it is impossible not to believe that, whether he did or did not
pronounce Byron's sentiment to be as theatrical, as vulgar, and as false
as it seems to some later critics, he would at any rate have substituted
for his edifying but rather irrelevant moral denunciations some exposure
of those gross faults in style and metre, in phrase and form, which now
disgust us.

There are many essays remaining on which I should like to comment if
there were room enough. But I have only space for a few more general
remarks on his general characteristics, and especially those which, as
Sainte-Beuve said to the altered Jeffrey of our altered days, are
"important to us." Let me repeat then that the peculiar value of Jeffrey
is not, as is that of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, or of Lamb, in very subtle,
very profound, or very original views of his subjects. He is neither a
critical Columbus nor a critical Socrates; he neither opens up
undiscovered countries, nor provokes and stimulates to the discovery of
them. His strength lies in the combination of a fairly wide range of
sympathy with an extraordinary shrewdness and good sense in applying
that sympathy. Tested for range alone, or for subtlety alone, he will
frequently be found wanting; but he almost invariably catches up those
who have thus outstripped him, when the subject of the trial is shifted
to soundness of estimate, intelligent connection of view, and absence of
eccentricity. And it must be again and again repeated that Jeffrey is by
no means justly chargeable with the Dryasdust failings so often
attributed to academic criticism. They said that on the actual Bench he
worried counsel a little too much, but that his decisions were almost
invariably sound. Not quite so much perhaps can be said for his other
exercise of the judicial function. But however much he may sometimes
seem to carp and complain, however much we may sometimes wish for a
little more equity and a little less law, it is astonishing how weighty
Jeffrey's critical judgments are after three quarters of a century which
has seen so many seeming heavy things grow light. There may be much
that he does not see; there may be some things which he is physically
unable to see; but what he does see, he sees with a clearness, and
co-ordinates in its bearings on other things seen with a precision,
which are hardly to be matched among the fluctuating and diverse race of
critics.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] To prevent mistakes it may be as well to say that Jeffrey's
_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_ appeared first in four volumes,
then in three, then in one.

[11] In the following remarks, reference is confined to the
_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_, 1 vol. London, 1853. This is
not merely a matter of convenience; the selection having been made with
very great care by Jeffrey himself at a time when his faculties were in
perfect order, and including full specimens of every kind of his work.

V

HAZLITT

The following paper was in great part composed, when I came across some
sentences on Hazlitt, written indeed before I was born, but practically
unpublished until the other day. In a review of the late Mr. Horne's
_New Spirit of the Age_, contributed to the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1845
and but recently included in his collected works, Thackeray writes thus
of the author of the book whose title Horne had rather rashly borrowed:

    The author of the _Spirit of the Age_ was one of the keenest and
    brightest critics that ever lived. With partialities and
    prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a sensibility so
    exquisite, an appreciation of humour, or pathos, or even of the
    greatest art, so lively, quick, and cultivated, that it was
    always good to know what were the impressions made by books or
    men or pictures on such a mind; and that, as there were not
    probably a dozen men in England with powers so varied, all the
    rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the opinions of
    this accomplished critic. He was of so different a caste to the
    people who gave authority in his day--the pompous big-wigs and
    schoolmen, who never could pardon him his familiarity of manner
    so unlike their own--his popular--too popular habits--and
    sympathies so much beneath their dignity; his loose, disorderly
    education gathered round those bookstalls or picture galleries
    where he laboured a penniless student, in lonely journeys over
    Europe tramped on foot (and not made, after the fashion of the
    regular critics of the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a
    postchaise), in every school of knowledge from St. Peter's at
    Rome to St. Giles's in London. In all his modes of life and
    thought, he was so different from the established authorities,
    with their degrees and white neck-cloths, that they hooted the
    man down with all the power of their lungs, and disdained to
    hear truth that came from such a ragged philosopher.

Some exceptions, no doubt, must be taken to this enthusiastic, and in
the main just, verdict. Hazlitt himself denied himself wit, yet if this
was mock humility, I am inclined to think that he spoke truth
unwittingly. His appreciation of humour was fitful and anything but
impartial, while, biographically speaking, the hardships of his
apprenticeship are very considerably exaggerated. It was not, for
instance, in a penniless or pedestrian manner that he visited St.
Peter's at Rome; but journeying with comforts of wine, _vetturini_, and
partridges, which his second wife's income paid for. But this does not
matter much, and, on the whole, the estimate is as just as it is
generous. Perhaps something of its inspiration may be set down to
fellow-feeling, both in politics and in the unsuccessful cultivation of
the arts of design. But as high an estimate of Hazlitt is quite
compatible with the strongest political dissent from his opinions, and
with a total freedom from the charge of wearing the willow for painting.

There is indeed no doubt that Hazlitt is one of the most absolutely
unequal writers in English, if not in any, literature, Wilson being
perhaps his only compeer. The term absolute is used with intention and
precision. There may be others who, in different parts of their work,
are more unequal than he is; but with him the inequality is pervading,
and shows itself in his finest passages, in those where he is most at
home, as much as in his hastiest and most uncongenial taskwork. It could
not, indeed, be otherwise, because the inequality itself is due less to
an intellectual than to a moral defect. The clear sunshine of Hazlitt's
admirably acute intellect is always there; but it is constantly obscured
by driving clouds of furious prejudice. Even as the clouds pass, the
light may still be seen on distant and scattered parts of the landscape;
but wherever their influence extends, there is nothing but thick
darkness, gusty wind and drenching rain. And the two phenomena, the
abiding intellectual light, and the fits and squalls of moral darkness,
appear to be totally independent of each other, or of any single will or
cause of any kind. It would be perfectly easy, and may perhaps be in
place later, to give a brief collection of some of the most absurd and
outrageous sayings that any writer, not a mere fool, can be charged
with: of sentences not representing quips and cranks of humour, or
judgments temporary and one-sided, though having a certain relative
validity, but containing blunders and calumnies so gross and palpable,
that the man who set them down might seem to have forfeited all claim to
the reputation either of an intelligent or a responsible being. And yet,
side by side with these, are other passages (and fortunately a much
greater number) which justify, and more than justify, Hazlitt's claims
to be as Thackeray says, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that
ever lived"; as Lamb had said earlier, "one of the wisest and finest
spirits breathing."

The only exception to be taken to the well-known panegyric of Elia is,
that it bestows this eulogy on Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy
state." Unluckily, it would seem, by a concurrence of all testimony,
even the most partial, that the unhealthy state was quite as natural as
the healthy one. Lamb himself plaintively wishes that "he would not
quarrel with the world at the rate he does"; and De Quincey, in his
short, but very interesting, biographical notice of Hazlitt (a notice
entirely free from the malignity with which De Quincey has been
sometimes charged), declares with quite as much truth as point, that
Hazlitt's guiding principle was, "Whatever is, is wrong." He was the
very ideal of a literary Ishmael; and after the fullest admission of the
almost incredible virulence and unfairness of his foes, it has to be
admitted, likewise, that he was quite as ready to quarrel with his
friends. He succeeded, at least once, in forcing a quarrel even upon
Lamb. His relations with Leigh Hunt (who, whatever his faults were, was
not unamiable) were constantly strained, and at least once actually
broken by his infernal temper. Nor were his relations with women more
fortunate or more creditable than those with men. That the fault was
entirely on his side in the rupture with his first wife is, no doubt,
not the case; for Mrs. Hazlitt's, or Miss Stoddart's, own friends admit
that she was of a peculiar and rather trying disposition. It is indeed
evident that she was the sort of person (most teasing of all others to a
man of Hazlitt's temperament) who would put her head back as he was
kissing her, to ask if he would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a
declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost
legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter,
and the _Liber Amoris_, the obvious and irresistible attack of something
like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly--but only
partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts
it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of the
endless drama of _All for Love, or The World Well Lost!_ Of his second
marriage, the only persons who might be expected to give us some
information either can or will say next to nothing. But when a man with
such antecedents marries a woman of whom no one has anything bad to
say, lives with her for a year, chiefly on her money, and is then
quitted by her with the information that she will have nothing more to
do with him, it is not, I think, uncharitable to conjecture that most of
the fault is his.

It is not, however, only of Hazlitt's rather imperfectly known life, or
of his pretty generally acknowledged character, that I wish to speak
here. His strange mixture of manly common-sense and childish prejudice,
the dislike of foreigners which accompanied his Liberalism and his
Bonapartism, and other traits, are very much more English than Irish.
But Irish, at least on the father's side, his family was, and had been
for generations. He was himself the son of a Unitarian minister, was
born at Maidstone in 1778, accompanied his parents as a very little boy
to America, but passed the greater part of his youth at Wem in
Shropshire, where the interview with Coleridge, which decided his fate,
took place. Yet for some time after that, he was mainly occupied with
studies, not of literature, but of art. He had been intended for his
father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such
schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of
a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they
are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a
juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least
eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and
the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by
his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those
who (for their sins or for their good) are condemned to a life of
writing for the press know that such an abstinence as this is almost
fatal. Perhaps no man ever did good work in periodical writing, unless
he had previously had a more or less prolonged period of reading, with
no view to writing. Certainly no one ever did other than very faulty
work if, not having such a store to draw on, when he began writing he
left off reading.

The first really important event in Hazlitt's life, except the visit
from Coleridge in 1798, was his own visit to Paris after the Peace of
Amiens in 1802--a visit authorised and defrayed by certain commissions
to copy pictures at the Louvre, which was then, in consequence of French
conquests, the picture-gallery of Europe. The chief of these
commissioners was a Mr. Railton, a person of some fortune at Liverpool,
and the father of a daughter who, if she was anything like her portrait,
had one of the most beautiful faces of modern times. Miss Railton was
one of Hazlitt's many loves: it was, perhaps, fortunate for her that the
course of the love did not run smooth. Almost immediately on his return,
he made acquaintance with the Lambs, and, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, his
grandson and biographer, thinks, with Miss Stoddart, his future wife.
Miss Stoddart, there is no doubt, was an elderly coquette, though
perfectly "proper." Besides the "William" of her early correspondence
with Mary Lamb, we hear of three or four other lovers of hers between
1803 and 1808, when she married Hazlitt. It so happens that one, and
only one, letter of his to her has been preserved. His biographer seems
to think it in another sense unique; but it is, in effect, a very
typical letter from a literary lover of a rather passionate temperament.
The two were married, in defiance of superstition, on Sunday, the first
of May; and certainly the superstition had not the worst of it.

At first, however, no evil results seemed likely. Miss Stoddart had a
certain property settled on her at Winterslow, on the south-eastern
border of Salisbury Plain, and for nearly four years the couple seem to
have dwelt there (once, at least, entertaining the Lambs), and producing
children, of whom only one lived. It was not till 1812 that they removed
to London, and that Hazlitt engaged in writing for the newspapers. From
this time till the end of his life, some eighteen years, he was never at
a loss for employment--a succession of daily and weekly papers, with
occasional employment on the _Edinburgh Review_, providing him, it would
seem, with sufficiently abundant opportunities for copy. The _London_,
the _New Monthly_ (where Campbell's dislike did him no harm), and other
magazines also employed him. For a time, he seems to have joined "the
gallery," and written ordinary press-work. During this time, which was
very short, and this time only, his friends admit a certain indulgence
in drinking, which he gave up completely, but which was used against him
with as much pitilessness as indecency in _Blackwood_; though heaven
only knows how the most Tory soul alive could see fitness of things in
the accusation of gin-drinking brought against Hazlitt by the
whiskey-drinkers of the _Noctes_. For the greater part of his literary
life he seems to have been almost a total abstainer, indulging only in
the very strongest of tea. He soon gave up miscellaneous press-work, as
far as politics went; but his passion for the theatre retained him as a
theatrical critic almost to the end of his life. He gradually drifted
into the business really best suited to him, that of essay-writing, and
occasionally lecturing on literary and miscellaneous subjects. During
the greatest part of his early London life, he was resident in a famous
house, now destroyed, in York Street, Westminster, next door to Bentham
and reputed to have once been tenanted by Milton; and he was a constant
attendant on Lamb's Wednesday evenings. The details of his life, it has
been said, are not much known. The chief of them, besides the breaking
out of his lifelong war with _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, was,
perhaps, his unlucky participation in the duel which proved fatal to
Scott, the editor of the _London_. It is impossible to imagine a more
deplorable muddle than this affair. Scott, after refusing the challenge
of Lockhart,[12] with whom he had, according to the customs of those
days, a sufficient ground of quarrel, accepted that of Christie,
Lockhart's second, with whom he had no quarrel at all. Moreover, when
his adversary had deliberately spared him in the first fire, he insisted
(it is said owing to the stupid conduct of his own second) on another,
and was mortally wounded. Hazlitt, who was more than indirectly
concerned in the affair, had a professed objection to duelling, which
would have been more creditable to him if he had not been avowedly of a
timid temper. But, most unfortunately, he was said, and believed, to
have spurred Scott on to the acceptance of the challenge, nor do his own
champions deny it. The scandal is long bygone, but is, unluckily, a fair
sample of the ugly stories which cluster round Hazlitt's name, and which
have hitherto prevented that justice being done to him which his
abilities deserve and demand.

This wretched affair occurred in February 1821, and, shortly afterwards,
the crowning complications of Hazlitt's own life, the business of the
_Liber Amoris_ and the divorce with his first wife, took place. The
first could only be properly described by an abundance of extracts, for
which there is here no room. Of the second, which, it must be
remembered, went on simultaneously with the first, it is sufficient to
say that the circumstances are nearly incredible. It was conducted under
the Scotch law with a blessed indifference to collusion: the direct
means taken to effect it were, if report may be trusted, scandalous; and
the parties met during the whole time, and placidly wrangled over money
matters, with a callousness which is ineffably disgusting. I have
hinted, in reference to Sarah Walker, that the tyranny of "Love
unconquered in battle" may be taken by a very charitable person to be a
sufficient excuse. In this other affair there is no such palliation;
unless the very charitable person should hold that a wife, who could so
forget her own dignity, justified any forgetfulness on the part of her
husband; and that a husband, who could haggle and chaffer about the
terms on which he should be disgracefully separated from his wife,
justified any forgetfulness of dignity on the wife's part.

Little has to be said about the rest of Hazlitt's life. Miss Sarah
Walker would have nothing to say to him; and it has been already
mentioned that the lady whom he afterwards married, a Mrs. Bridgewater,
had enough of him after a year's experience. He did not outlive this
last shock more than five years; and unfortunately his death was
preceded by a complete financial break-down, though he was more
industrious during these later years than at any other time, and though
he had abundance of well-paid work. The failure of the publishers, who
were to have paid him five hundred pounds for his _magnum opus_, the
partisan and almost valueless _Life of Napoleon_, had something to do
with this, and the dishonesty of an agent is said to have had more, but
details are not forthcoming. He died on the eighteenth of September
1830, saying, "Well, I have had a happy life"; and despite his son's
assertion that, like Goldsmith, he had something on his mind, I believe
this to have been not ironical but quite sincere. He was only fifty-two,
so that the infirmities of age had not begun to press on him. Although,
except during the brief duration of his second marriage, he had always
lived by his wits, it does not appear that he was ever in any want, or
that he had at any time to deny himself his favourite pleasures of
wandering about and being idle when he chose. If he had not been
completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the
triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was
one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then
breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace
delights--a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of
reflection, even a well-cooked meal--make up for the suffering of not
wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary
battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he
received from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life,
and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am
myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly
uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet
produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them)
that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic.
It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must
rest; not on the frenzied outpourings of the _Liber Amoris_ (full as
these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned
_Life of Napoleon_; still less on his clever-boy essay on the
_Principles of Human Action_, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary
compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's
Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his
writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a
few do not seem to have been yet collected from his _Remains_ and from
the publications in which they originally appeared.

These books--the _Spirit of the Age_, _Table Talk_, _The Plain Speaker_,
_The Round Table_ (including the _Conversations with Northcote_ and
_Characteristics_), _Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers_,
_Elizabethan Literature_ and _Characters of Shakespeare_, _Sketches and
Essays_ (including _Winterslow_)--represent the work, roughly speaking,
of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the earlier and
longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a
long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly
homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures
differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the
frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family
likeness to the good-humoured _reportage_ of "On going to a Fight," or
the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to
Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because,
independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to
possess a style or, at least, a manner--indeed, he somewhere or other
distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his
fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some
of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his
casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to
Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read
Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the _Edinburgh_)
carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the
beginning of it, much as he improved on it afterwards. Nor is there any
doubt that, in a very different way, Hazlitt served as a model to
Thackeray, to Dickens, and to many not merely of the most popular, but
of the greatest, writers of the middle of the century. Indeed, in the
_Spirit of the Age_ there are distinct anticipations of Carlyle. He had
the not uncommon fate of producing work which, little noted by the
public, struck very strongly those of his juniors who had any literary
faculty. If he had been, just by a little, a greater man than he was, he
would, no doubt, have elaborated an individual manner, and not have
contented himself with the hints and germs of manners. As it was, he had
more of seed than of fruit. And the secret of this is, undoubtedly, to
be found in the obstinate individuality of thought which characterised
him all through. Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly
because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion
because other people did hold it. And all his opinions, even those which
seem to have been adopted simply to quarrel with the world, were genuine
opinions. He has himself drawn a striking contrast in this point,
between himself and Lamb, in one of the very best of all his essays, the
beautiful "Farewell to Essay-writing" reprinted in _Winterslow_. The
contrast is a remarkable one, and most men, probably, who take great
interest in literature or politics, or indeed in any subject admitting
of principles, will be able to furnish similar contrasts from their own
experience.

    In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions
    have not been quite shallow and hasty, is the circumstance of
    their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books,
    pictures, passages that I ever had; I may therefore presume
    that they will last me my life--nay, I may indulge a hope that
    my thoughts will survive me. This continuity of impression is
    the only thing on which I pride myself. Even Lamb, whose relish
    of certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a
    surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his
    select authors or particular friends after a lapse of ten years.
    As for myself, any one knows where to have me. What I have once
    made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of the chapter.

This is quite true if we add a proviso to it--a proviso, to be sure, of
no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not
different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure
his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the
two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to
wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called.
He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He "shows to
the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep"; a want of depth not
surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the
Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than
suspected that he had read little but the French and English
philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of
persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely
metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no
clear political creed at all. He hated something called "the hag
legitimacy," but for the hag despotism, in the person of Bonaparte, he
had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine
Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a
mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call
"Jupiter Scapin" "the greatest man who ever lived," must be entirely
blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and
all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that "gentleman" is
exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have
published the _Liber Amoris_, not at all because of its so-called
voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But
the most curious example of Hazlitt's weaknesses is the language he uses
in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary
differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely
none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will
excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the
_Spirit of the Age_? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of
loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an
acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the
House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and
seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the
character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an
elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms
as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows,"
"slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility,"
"lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of
as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does
not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the
character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have
to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in regard to
this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words,
"the dotage of age and the fury of a woman," form the best short
description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and
tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors
and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) that
he exercises his spleen. His remarks on Burke (_Round Table_, p. 150)
suggest temporary insanity. Sir Philip Sidney (as Lamb, a perfectly
impartial person who had no politics at all, pointed out) was a kind of
representative of the courtly monarchist school in literature. So down
must Sir Philip go; and not only the _Arcadia_, that "vain and
amatorious poem" which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would
have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down
also before his remorseless bludgeon.

But there is no need to say any more of these faults of his, and there
is no need to say much of another and more purely literary fault with
which he has been charged--the fault of excessive quotation. In him the
error lies rather in the constant repetition of the same, than in a too
great multitude of different borrowings. Almost priding himself on
limited study, and (as he tells us) very rarely reading his own work
after it was printed, he has certainly abused his right of press most
damnably in some cases. "Dry as a remainder biscuit," and "of no mark or
likelihood," occur to me as the most constantly recurrent tags; but
there are many others.

These various drawbacks, however, only set off the merits which almost
every lover of literature must perceive in him. In most writers, in all
save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special
faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other
(generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in
them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or
gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in
Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything,
except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he
makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony
of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can
be found in prose may be found at times in his. He is generally thought
of as, and for the most part is, a rather plain and straightforward
writer, with few tricks and frounces of phrase and style. Yet most of
the fine writing of these latter days is but as crumpled tarlatan to
brocaded satin beside the passage on Coleridge in the _English Poets_,
or the description of Winterslow and its neighbourhood in the "Farewell
to Essay-writing," or "On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin" in the
_Table-Talk_. Read these pieces and nothing else, and an excusable
impression might be given that the writer was nothing if not florid. But