icknames, which, taken altogether, make up only a small
number of ideas.

His scale, likewise, is meagre. His essay is apt to be a book review or
a plea merely; it is without that free illusiveness and undeveloped
suggestion which indicate a full mind and give to such brief pieces of
writing the sense of overflow. He takes no large subject as a whole, but
either a small one or else some phases of the larger one; and he
exhausts all that he touches. He seems to have no more to say. It is
probable that his acquaintance with literature was incommensurate with
his reputation or apparent scope as a writer. As he has fewer ideas than
any other author of his time of the same rank, so he discloses less
knowledge of his own or foreign literatures. His occupations forbade
wide acquisition; he husbanded his time, and economized also by giving
the best direction to his private studies, and he accomplished much; but
he could not master the field as any man whose profession was literature
might easily do. Consequently, in comparison with Coleridge or Lowell,
his critical work seems dry and bare, with neither the fluency nor the
richness of a master.

In yet another point this paucity of matter appears. What Mr. Richard
Holt Hutton says in his essay on the poetry of Arnold is so apposite
here that it will be best to quote the passage. He is speaking, in an
aside, of Arnold's criticisms:--

"They are fine, they are keen, they are often true; but they
are always too much limited to the thin superficial layer of
the moral nature of their subjects, and seem to take little
comparative interest in the deeper individuality beneath.
Read his essay on Heine, and you will see the critic
engrossed with the relation of Heine to the political and
social ideas of his day, and passing over with comparative
indifference the true soul of Heine, the fountain of both his
poetry and his cynicism. Read his five lectures on
translating Homer, and observe how exclusively the critic's
mind is occupied with the form as distinguished from the
substance of the Homeric poetry. Even when he concerns
himself with the greatest modern poets,--with Shakespeare as
in the preface to the earlier edition of his poems, or with
Goethe in reiterated poetical criticisms, or when he again
and again in his poems treats of Wordsworth,--it is always
the style and superficial doctrine of thei