rom 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 Caesario has been sleeping
with a