nguished; it is a faculty which in the
same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had
the gift of singing those admirable songs of which we have been talking.
On the other, he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which
only three others of the great dead men of this century in
England--Canning, Praed, and Thackeray--have reached. Besides all this,
he was a "considerable man of letters." But your considerable men of
letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and other
considerable or inconsiderable men of letters spring out of it. The true
poets and even the true satirists abide, and both as a poet and a
satirist Thomas Moore abides and will abide with them.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] _Etude sur la Vie et les Oeuvres de Thomas Moore_; by Gustave
Vallat. Paris: Rousseau. London: Asher and Co. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis,
and Co. 1887.

VII

LEIGH HUNT

To compare the peaceful and home-keeping art of criticism to the
adventurous one of lighthouse-building may seem an excursion into the
heroi-comic, if not into the tragic-burlesque. Neither is it in the
least my intention to dwell on a tolerably obvious metaphorical
resemblance between the two. It is certainly the business of the critic
to warn others off from the mistakes which have been committed by his
forerunners, and perhaps (for let us anticipate the crushing wit) from
his own. But that is not my reason for the suggestion. There is a story
of I forget what lighthouse which Smeaton, or Stevenson, or somebody
else, had unusual difficulty in establishing. The rock was too near the
surface for it to be safe or practicable to moor barges over it; and it
was uncovered for too short a time to enable any solid foundations to be
laid or even begun during one tide. So the engineer, with other
adventurous persons, got himself landed on it, succeeded after a vain
attempt or two in working an iron rod into the middle, and then hung on
bodily while the tide was up, that he and his men might begin again as
soon as it receded. In a mild and unexciting fashion, that is what the
critic has to do--to dig about till he makes a lodgment in his author,
hang on to it, and then begin to build. It is not always very easy work,
and it is never less easy than in the case of the author whom somebody
has kindly called "the Ariel of criticism." Leigh Hunt is an extremely
difficult person upon whom to make any critical lodgment, for the reason
that