e struggles of his youth
and lifelong ill-health no doubt aggravated a disposition at no time
very sweet; and the feuds of the day, both literary and political, were
apt to be waged, even by men far superior to Gifford in early and
natural advantages, with the extremest asperity and without too much
scruple. But Gifford is perhaps our capital example in English of a cast
of mind which is popularly identified with that of the critic, though in
truth nothing is more fatal to the attainment of the highest critical
competence. It was apparently impossible for him (as it has been, and,
it would seem, is for others,) to regard the author whom he was
criticising, the editor who had preceded him in his labours, or the
adversary with whom he was carrying on a polemic, as anything but a
being partly idiotic and partly villainous, who must be soundly scolded,
first for having done what he did, and secondly to prevent him from
doing it again. So ingrained was this habit in Gifford that he could
refrain from indulging it, neither in editing the essays of his most
distinguished contributors, nor in commenting on the work of these
contributors, outside the periodicals which he directed. Yet he was a
really useful influence in more ways than one. The service that he did
in forcibly suppressing the Della Cruscan nuisance is even yet admitted,
and there has been plentiful occasion, not always taken, for similar
literary _dragonnades_ since. And his work as an editor of English
classics was, blemishes of manner and temper excepted, in the main very
good work.

Thomas James Mathias, the author of _The Pursuits of Literature_, was a
much nearer approach to the pedant pure and simple. For he did not, like
Gifford, redeem his rather indiscriminate attacks on contemporaries by a
sincere and intelligent devotion to older work; and he was, much more
than Gifford, ostentatious of such learning as he possessed. Accordingly
the immense popularity of his only book of moment is a most remarkable
sign of the times. De Quincey, who had seen its rise and its fall,
declares that for a certain time, and not a very short one, at the end
of the last century and the beginning of this, _The Pursuits of
Literature_ was the most popular book of its own day, and as popular as
any which had appeared since; and that there is not very much hyperbole
in this is proved by its numerous editions, and by the constant
references to it in the books of the time. Colman, wh