are in fact collections of
"articles"--sometimes reprinted, sometimes published for the first time.

It was impossible that such a mass of matter should be all good; and it
is equally impossible to deny that the combined fact of so much
production and of so little concentration argues a certain idiosyncrasy
of defect. In fact the butterfly character which every unprejudiced
critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for him to plan or
to execute any work on a great scale. He never could have troubled
himself to complete missing knowledge, to fill in gaps, to co-ordinate
thinking, as the literary historian, whose vocation in some respects he
might seem to have possessed eminently, must do--to weave fancy into the
novelist's solid texture, and not to leave it in thrums or in gossamer.
But he was, though in both ways a most unequal, a delightful
miscellanist and critic. In both respects it is natural, and indeed
unavoidable, to compare him with Lamb and with Hazlitt, whom, however,
he really preceded, forming a link between them and the eighteenth
century essayists. His greater voluminousness, induced by necessity,
puts him at a rather unfair disadvantage with the first; and we may
perhaps never find in him those exquisite felicities which delight and
justify the true "Agnist." Yet he has found some things that Lamb missed
in Lamb's own subjects; and though his prejudices (of the middle-class
Liberal and freethinking kind) were sometimes more damaging than any to
which Lamb was exposed, he was free from the somewhat wilful eclecticism
of that inimitable person. He could like nearly all things that were
good--in which respect he stands above both his rivals in criticism. But
he stands below them in his miscellaneous work; though here also, as in
his poetry, he was a master, not a scholar. Lamb and Hazlitt improved
upon him here, as Keats and Shelley improved upon him there. But what a
position is it to be "improved upon" by Keats and Shelley in poetry, by
Hazlitt and Lamb in prose!

Hartley Coleridge might with about equal propriety have been treated in
the last chapter and in this; but the already formidable length of the
catalogue of bards perhaps turns the scale in favour of placing him with
other contributors to _Blackwood_, to which, thanks to his early
friendship with Wilson, he enjoyed access, and in which he might have
written much more than he did, and did actually write most of what he
published himself