ounce
Its homage to the human form divine,

Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
essays on Mme. de Stael and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of Rylstone" (though I
am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
character, and even in his purely political arguments.

The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Bein