ual almost anything that the poet has ever done. And
only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went
wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly
damning "The Dying Swan," which stands at the very head of a whole class
of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words,
he simply "plouters"--splashes and flounders about without any guidance
of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the
paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which
Lockhart made a little later in the _Quarterly_. There one finds little,
if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate
determination to "cut up." But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic
it is to think that the said critic was the author of "I ride from land
to land" and "When youthful hope is fled") sees his theory of poetry
straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual
censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the
propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned
under the statute,--so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that
does not matter--and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with
Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right
(and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong--goes wrong,
that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is
not criticism.

We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point
of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the "Lays."
Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction,
is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and
life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights--as far as
English verse goes, except Drayton's "Agincourt" and the last canto of
"Marmion"; as far as English prose goes, except some passages of Mallory
and two or three pages of Kingsley's--the Battle of the Lake Regillus.
The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he
liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes
appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.

Yet, according to his own perverse fashion, he never goes wrong without
going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most
intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.
How good is it