uch uniform and unerring judgment as
this or these. Even Lamb, in his own favourite subjects and authors,
misses treasure-trove which Leigh Hunt unfailingly discovers, as in the
now pretty generally acknowledged case of the character of De Flores in
Middleton's "Changeling." And Lamb had a much less wide and a much more
crotchety system of admissions and exclusions. Macaulay was perfectly
right in fixing, at the beginning of his essay on the dramatists of the
Restoration, upon this catholicity of Hunt's taste as the main merit in
it; and it is really a great pity that the two volumes referred to were
not, as they were intended to be, followed up by others respectively
devoted to Action and Passion, Contemplation, and Song. But Leigh Hunt
was sixty when he planned them, and age, infirmity, perhaps also the
less pressing need which the comparative affluence of his later years
brought, prevented the completion. It has also to be remarked that Hunt
is much better as a taster than as a professor or expounder. He says
indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they
evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good
at generalities, and when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as
an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a
man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong
in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general
critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the
reasons that support them. For instance, he is probably right in calling
the famous "intellectual" and "henpecked you all" in "Don Juan," "the
happiest triple rhyme ever written." But when he goes on to say that
"the sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of the
effect," he goes very near to talking nonsense. For most people,
however, a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence
than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this that
makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good reading. It is
impossible not to feel that when a guide (which after all a critic
should be) is recommended with cautions that, though an invaluable
fellow for the most part, he is not unlikely in certain places to lead
the traveller over a precipice, it is a very dubious kind of
recommendation. Yet this is the way in which one has to speak of Jeffrey
and Hazlitt, of Wilson and De Quincey. Of Leigh Hu