the time a very wide
one, was certainly not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a
feeble one. In the before-mentioned _Peter's Letters_ (which, with all
its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most
spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious
and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh
Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be
remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge,
Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on
their merits, and that in this very passage _Blackwood_ is condemned not
less severely than the _Edinburgh_. Another point in which Lockhart made
a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in
England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism
of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical
jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more
than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly
evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and
colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of
criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate
of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he
has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing
more than an amusing contributor of remarkably promising trifles to
magazines, and that, from the appearance of _Waverley_ to that of
_Pickwick_, no novelist of the first class had made an appearance. It
is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has
been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early
protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling,
as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But
he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him
into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours,
criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no
parade of definite aesthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he
had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of
"Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quantity
of _Janua_, which he overlooked) in the older l