tes
and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
he was in his own. For the spirit of merely aesthetic criticism, which
was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.

Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
himself more directly and theoretically to literary criticism than
Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of _Essays in
Criticism_.

Let us, as we just now looked through Jeffrey's work to pick out the
less favourable characteristics which distinguish his position, look
through it again to see those qualities which he shares, but in greater
measure than most, with all good critics. The literary essay which
stands first in his colle