ed. Still there are blunders and blunders; and some of Jeffrey's
sins in that kind are such as it is not very easy to forgive. If he
attacked great men, it has been said in his defence, he attacked those
parts of their writings which were really objectionable. And, of course,
nobody will deny that (for example) Wordsworth's wilful and ostentatious
inversion of accepted rules presented a very tempting mark to the
critic. But--to say nothing of Jeffrey's failure to discharge adequately
the correlative duty of generous praise--it must be admitted that his
ridicule seems to strike pretty much at random. He picks out Southey,
certainly the least eminent of the so-called school of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Lamb, as the one writer of the set whose poetry deserves
serious consideration; and, besides attacking Wordsworth's faults, his
occasional flatness and childishness, selects some of his finest poems
(e.g. the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality) as flagrant specimens
of the hopelessly absurd.

The 'White Doe of Rylstone' may not be Wordsworth's best work, but a man
who begins a review of it by proclaiming it to be 'the very worst poem
ever imprinted in a quarto volume,' who follows up this remark by
unmixed and indiscriminating abuse, and who publishes the review
twenty-eight years later as expressing his mature convictions, is
certainly proclaiming his own gross incompetence. Or, again, Jeffrey
writes about 'Wilhelm Meister' (in 1824), knowing its high reputation in
Germany, and finds in it nothing but a text for a dissertation upon the
amazing eccentricity of national taste which can admire 'sheer
nonsense,' and at length proclaims himself tired of extracting 'so much
trash.' There is a kind of indecency, a wanton disregard of the general
consensus of opinion, in such treatment of a contemporary classic (then
just translated by Carlyle, and so brought within Jeffrey's sphere)
which one would hope to be now impossible. It is true that Jeffrey
relents a little at the end, admits that Goethe has 'great talent,' and
would like to withdraw some of his censure. Whilst, therefore, he
regards the novel as an instance of that diversity of national taste
which makes a writer idolised in one country who would not be tolerated
in another, he would hold it out rather as an object of wonder than
contempt. Though the greater part 'would not be endured, and, indeed,
could not have been written in England,' there are many passages of
w