then, it must be
remembered that he does not allow it to affect his _literary_ judgement. I
do not believe that any one now living has a greater admiration for Swift
than I have: and all that I can say is that I know no estimate of his
genius anywhere more adequate than Thackeray's. As for Sterne, I do not
intend to say much. If you will thrust your personality into your
literature, as Sterne constantly does, you must take the chances of your
personality as well as of your literature. You practically expose both to
the judgement of the public. And if anybody chooses to take up the cudgels
for Sterne's personality I shall hand them over to him and take no part on
one side or another in that bout. To his _genius_, once more, I do not
think Thackeray at all unjust.

The fact is, however, that as is usual with persons of genius, but even
more than as usual, the defects and the qualities are so intimately
connected that you cannot have one without the other--you must pay the
price of the other for the one. All I can say is that such another _live_
piece of English criticism of English literature as this I do not know
anywhere. What is alive is very seldom perfect: to get perfection you must
go to epitaphs. But, once more, though I could pick plenty of small holes
in the details of the actual critical dicta, I know no picture of the
division of literature here concerned from which a fairly intelligent
person will derive a better impression of the facts than from this.
Addison may be a little depressed, and Steele a little exalted: but it is
necessary to remember that by Macaulay, whose estimate then practically
held the field, Steele had been most unduly depressed and Addison rather
unduly exalted. You may go about among our critics on the brightest day
with the largest lantern and find nothing more brilliant itself than the
"Congreve" article, where the spice of injustice will, again, deceive
nobody but a fool. The vividness of the "Addison and Steele" presentation
is miraculous. He redresses Johnson on Prior as he had redressed Macaulay
on Steele; and he is not unjust, as we might have feared that he would be,
to Pope. "Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding" is another miracle of
appreciation: and I should like to ask the objectors to "sentimentality"
by what other means than an intense _sympathy_ (from which it is
impossible to exclude something that may be called sentimental) such a
study as that of Goldsmith could have been pr