xamples of his weakness, is to be found in his essays on
Cowper. I have already given some of the weakness: the strength is to be
found in his general description of Cowper's revolt, thought so daring
at the time, now so apparently moderate, against poetic diction. These
instances are to be found under miscellaneous sections, biographical,
historical, and so forth; but the reader will naturally turn to the
considerable divisions headed Poetry and Fiction. Here are the chief
rocks of offence already indicated, and here also are many excellent
things which deserve reading. Here is the remarkable essay, quoted
above, on Campbell's _Specimens_. Here is the criticism of Weber's
edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of
English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did
so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift
style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first
place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's
_Characters of Shakespeare_ (Hazlitt was an _Edinburgh_ reviewer, and
his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece of
generosity on Jeffrey's part towards his wayward contributor) is a
little defaced by a patronising spirit, not, indeed, of that memorably
mistaken kind which induced the famous and unlucky sentence to Macvey
Napier about Carlyle, but something in the spirit of the schoolmaster
who observes, "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much
better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on
Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that
its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious
acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of
Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's
sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal and
unmatchable

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

with the rest of the passage. But there you have the French spirit. I do
not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth
century (unless perchance it was Gerard de Nerval, and he was not quite
sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little
stars seemed to him puerile and conceited.

Jeffrey's dealings with Byron (I do not now speak of the article on
_Hours of Idleness_, which was simply a just rebuke of really puerile
and