tient 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 ren