in censuring
the life of Burns and in exalting the virtuous insipidities of Maria
Edgeworth's tales as it might have been done by any faithful minister of
the gospel. To be sure he cannot be said to have held tenaciously to the
old set of canons. Though he stanchly withstood the new-fangled poetic
practices of Wordsworth and of Southey, he bowed before the great
popularity of Scott and Byron, even at the cost of some of his favorite
maxims. In his writings the solvents of the older criticism are best seen
at work. Jeffrey both by instinct and training was a lawyer, and his
position at the head of the most respected periodical formed a natural
temptation to a dictatorial manner. He was a judge who tried to uphold the
literary constitution but wavered in the face of a strong popular
opposition. When the support of precedent failed him, he remained without
any firm conviction of his own. While his poetic taste was quite adequate
to the appreciation of a Samuel Rogers or a Barry Cornwall, it was
incomparably futile in the perception of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. In a
passage composed at the end of his long editorial career in 1829, he
unconsciously announced his own extinction as a critic:

"Since the beginning of our critical career, we have seen a vast deal of
beautiful poetry pass into oblivion, in spite of our feeble efforts to
recall or retain it in remembrance. The tuneful quartos of Southey are
already little better than lumber:--and the rich melodies of Keats and
Shelley,--and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,--and the plebeian
pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The
novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of
Moore are fading into distance and dimness, except where they have been
married to immortal music; and the blazing star of Byron himself is
receding from its place of pride. We need say nothing of Milman, and
Croly, and Atherstone, and Hood, and a legion of others, who, with no
ordinary gifts of taste and fancy, have not so properly survived their
fame, as been excluded by some hard fatality, from what seemed their just
inheritance. The two who have the longest withstood this rapid withering
of the laurel, and with the least marks of decay on their branches, are
Rogers and Campbell; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous
writers, and both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate
elegance of their writings, than for that fiery p