considerable praise for the pains he has taken in revising
the text, and for some improvements he has introduced into it. He had
better have spared the notes, in which, though he has detected the
blunders of previous commentators, he has exposed his own ill-temper and
narrowness of feeling more. As a critic, he has thrown no light on the
character and spirit of his authors. He has shewn no striking power of
analysis nor of original illustration, though he has chosen to exercise
his pen on writers most congenial to his own turn of mind, from their
dry and caustic vein; Massinger, and Ben Jonson. What he will make of
Marlowe, it is difficult to guess. He has none of "the fiery quality"
of the poet. Mr. Gifford does not take for his motto on these
occasions--_Spiritus precipitandus est!_--His most successful efforts in
this way are barely respectable. In general, his observations are petty,
ill-concocted, and discover as little _tact_, as they do a habit of
connected reasoning. Thus, for instance, in attempting to add the name
of Massinger to the list of Catholic poets, our minute critic insists
on the profusion of crucifixes, glories, angelic visions, garlands of
roses, and clouds of incense scattered through the _Virgin-Martyr,_ as
evidence of the theological sentiments meant to be inculcated by the
play, when the least reflection might have taught him, that they proved
nothing but the author's poetical conception of the character and
_costume_ of his subject. A writer might, with the same sinister,
short-sighted shrewdness, be accused of Heathenism for talking of Flora
and Ceres in a poem on the Seasons! What are produced as the exclusive
badges and occult proofs of Catholic bigotry, are nothing but the
adventitious ornaments and external symbols, the gross and sensible
language, in a word, the _poetry_ of Christianity in general. What
indeed shews the frivolousness of the whole inference is that Deckar,
who is asserted by our critic to have contributed some of the most
passionate and fantastic of these devotional scenes, is not even
suspected of a leaning to Popery. In like manner, he excuses Massinger
for the grossness of one of his plots (that of the _Unnatural Combat_)
by saying that it was supposed to take place before the Christian era;
by this shallow common-place persuading himself, or fancying he could
persuade others, that the crime in question (which yet on the very face
of the story is made the ground of a tra