say that he ever wrote
either with a deliberate intention to wound or with a deliberate
indifference whether he wounded or not, I do not believe.

The other charge, that he was a bad or rather a very untrustworthy
critic of books, cannot be met quite so directly. He is indeed
responsible for a singularly large number of singularly grave critical
blunders--by which I mean of course not critical opinions disagreeing
with my own, but critical opinions which the general consent of
competent critics, on the whole, negatives. The minor classical writers
are not much read now, but there must be a sufficient jury to whom I can
appeal to know what is to be done with a professed critic of style--at
least asserting himself to be no mean classical scholar--who declares
that "Paganism had no more brilliant master of composition to show
than"--Velleius Paterculus! Suppose this to be a mere fling or freak,
what is to be thought of a man who evidently sets Cicero, as a writer,
if not as a thinker, above Plato? It would be not only possible but easy
to follow this up with a long list of critical enormities on De
Quincey's part, enormities due not to accidental and casual crotchet or
prejudice, as in Hazlitt's case, but apparently to some perverse
idiosyncrasy. I doubt very much, though the doubt may seem horribly
heretical to some people, whether De Quincey really cared much for
poetry as poetry. He liked philosophical poets:--Milton, Wordsworth,
Shakespeare (inasmuch as he perceived Shakespeare to be the greatest of
philosophical poets), Pope even in a certain way. But read the
interesting paper which late in life he devoted to Shelley. He treats
Shelley as a man admirably, with freedom alike from the maudlin
sentiment of our modern chatterers and from Puritanical preciseness. He
is not too hard on him in any way, he thinks him a pleasing personality
and a thinker distorted but interesting. Of Shelley's strictly poetical
quality he says nothing, if he knew or felt anything. In fact, of
lyrical poetry generally, that is to say of poetry in its most purely
poetical condition, he speaks very little in all his extensive critical
dissertations. His want of appreciation of it may supply explanation of
his unpardonable treatment of Goethe. That he should have maltreated
_Wilhelm Meister_ is quite excusable. There are fervent admirers of
Goethe at his best who acknowledge most fully the presence in _Wilhelm_
of the two worst characteristics o