-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 a la creme_ 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 a la creme_; 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 anecdo