a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
disasters of the country.

In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
Romantic up to a certain point,--the point which he had himself reached
in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of
criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
ill