critical reputation upon them, there could
not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
Trade.

In reading Jeffrey's work[11] nowadays, the critical reader finds it
considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
poetry in general, anticipating Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
made him "quite impa