is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.

His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
of the Court of Session, and respectably, though not brilliantly,
connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
to a kind of studious independen