course of a long literary life, I doubt whether he was ever provoked to
use a single word of asperity or sarcasm towards any of his
contemporaries. This was praise which alone ought to have exempted him
from the harsh and unmerited censure of Porson, by whom he was called
Criticorum et Poetarum pessimus. He sometimes on the other hand,
indulged himself too much in a lavish and indiscriminate commendation of
contemporary writers. But from whatever might appear like flattery of
the great, he scrupulously abstained. When the Princess Charlotte
visited him at Felpham, he would not present some verses he had written
on her, lest he should be thought capable of that meanness.

His Essays on Painting, History, and Poetry, contain much information
that may be useful to young artists and students. That on Sculpture is
very inferior to the rest; as the Triumph of Music is to the Triumphs of
Temper. The last of these is a poem that still continues to interest a
class of readers, whose studies are intimately connected with the
happiness and well being of society. The design of it, which is to shew
the advantages of self-control to the mind of a well-educated girl, is
much to be commended. The machinery though it required no great effort
in the production, yet suffices to give some relief to the story. It has
been remarked that the trials of the Heroine are too insignificant. But
of one of them, at least, the calumny in the newspaper, this cannot
properly be said. Nor would the purpose of the writer have been so well
answered, if he had been more serious, and had uttered his oracles from
behind a graver mask.

The taste which has been lately excited amongst us for Spanish and
Italian literature, after having slept nearly since the age of
Elizabeth, may be attributed in a great measure to the influence of his
example. Gray, Hurd, and the two Wartons, had done something towards
awakening it, but the spell was completed by him. The decisive impulse
was given by the copious extracts from the great poets in those
languages, which he inserted in the notes to his Essay on Epic Poetry,
and which he accompanied by spirited translations. Lord Holland, the
best informed and most elegant of our writers on the subject of the
Spanish theatre, declared that he had been induced to learn that
language by what Hayley had written concerning the poet Ercilla.

I have heard his Greek scholarship questioned in consequence of an error
which, in his Epis