s of their goodness or
badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work,
that it is to be found _nusquam nullibi nullimodis_. He can preach
(though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste)
delightful sermons about what he likes at the moment--for it is by no
means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with
various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment--which again is not
always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his
likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself
whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first
qualifications of the critic:--lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the
mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a
singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.
His most famous sentence "The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities
live for ever" is certainly noble. But it would have been better if the
Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.

Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his
collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his
longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason
is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled
in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst
book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant
contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely
than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But
the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the
circumstances of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself
superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called _The Recreations
of Christopher North_, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed
that, in the _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, an equally miscellaneous
character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not
given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a
choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth
(most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr.,
Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's "Lays"
of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary
stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a ve