himself better, though not much, at defending the order of his country than preserving that of his class. Peace to the manes of the old man! a peace which all his books already and profoundly enjoy.) His annihilation of a host of other poetasters, from drunken Dermody down to poor prosing Hayley; his attempted demolition of that clever transgressor, Tommy Little, who, however, showed fight; and his incessant, persevering, powerful, but unsuccessful attempts to make Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, the laughing-stocks of the world. And this brings us to what would require a volume for its elucidation, the sore subject of the faults, errors, and delinquencies of The Edinburgh Review. In a word or two on the ungracious subject we must be indulged.

The great error of the early numbers was one incident to, perhaps inseparable from, the age of its principal writers. It lay in an air of levity and dogmatism, added to a sneering, captious, skeptical spirit, imbibed from intimacy with "Candide" and the "Philosophical Dictionary." It seemed their aim to transplant the "Encyclopædiast" spirit, in all its brilliant wickedness, into the Scottish soil. This appeared at first a hazardous experiment, but it was done so dexterously and so boldly as, for the time, to be completely successful. Fired by success, its authors dared every thing, sneered at every thing, attempted to solve the foundations of all things, in an atmosphere of universal ridicule. They themselves, young men though they were, had not only no enthusiasm, but proclaimed themselves enemies to enthusiasm, in all its forms, in politics, in poetry, in religion. Whatever transcended the common standards of feeling and of thought, whatever towered up into the regions of the extravagantly sublime, the eccentric, the original, and the infinite, they sought to reduce to its level, by the one sove

reign receipt of indiscriminate and reckless sneering. The flower of German poetry, then opening its magnificent petals into day, they laughed to scorn, as if it had been a vulgar and gaudy weed, or a useless and noisome fungus. They assailed with bitter ridicule at once republicanism and methodism, careless of the fine spirit involved in and extractable from both. But especially, from the first, they applied all their energies to the demolition of the Lake Poets, whose revolutionary genius was then threatening to alter the whole tone and spirit, and matter and manner of our literature. Of these attacks upon Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, we have ever entertained one opinion. They were not atrociously savage assaults, like those of The Quarterly on Keats and Shelley, but they were, on this very account, the more formidable. Their sole aim, and it was for a while successful, was to make the Lakers, not hateful, but ridiculous; to hold them up as a set of harmless, crazy men, overflowing with vanity and childish verse; not without genius, certainly, but their genius by no means first rate, and altogether neutralized by false taste and self-conceit. Such was the prevailing tone and style of those celebrated criticisms; and their effect was, first of all, to intensify, almost to madness, the egotism and the resolution of the parties assailed, to drive their works out of general circulation, to increase the attachment of their devoted adherents, and ultimately to provoke a reaction, the most signal and irreversible of which we have any example in the history of letters. The men whose names were, for twenty years, laughed at in every form of ridicule, and identified with all that was vain, silly, childish, egotistical, and affected, are now looked up to with universal love and reverence, and have been hailed by acclamation as the leading stars in the bright host of our literary heaven. Let

it be a lesson to succeeding critics for ever; and let us, in looking back upon the prophecies of those reviewers, which have not been fulfilled-their sneers, which have fallen powerless; their laughter, which has died away; their abuse, which time has robbed of its sting; their criticisms, on which experience has set the seal of worthlessness;— blame not so much the men, as the false and bad system on which they acted, and draw the solid and sober inference, that ridicule is no more a test of poetry than it is of truth.

But, to pass from this topic, on which, after all, we have only touched, we would now, in order fully to convey our idea of Lord Jeffrey's criticism, compare it with that of some others of his coadjutors and contemporaries. It wants the racy originality, the sweeping and springing strength, the tumultuous overflow of humour, which distinguishes the author of "Peter Plymley's Letters ;" but, on the other hand, possesses always a subtlety of distinction, and often a splendour of illustration, to which Sidney Smith has no pretensions. The one could no more have written the review of "Styles," than the other the review of Alison. It has not the massive strength of Brougham; but is superior in refinement, fluency, and elegance, and never falls into his more offensive faults,-the overbearing dogmatism, the arrogance, the fierce and truculent spirit, which breathes in more articles than in that on Don Pedro Cevallos. comprehensive, less judicial, less learned, than the criticism. of Mackintosh, it is more lively, more varied, and animated by a sweeter, purer and more natural vein of eloquence. It is not so glowing, or so imaginative, as the criticism of Wil son; but is more subtle in its thinking, and more sober in its style. It wants the nerve, the antithesis, the rich literary allusion, the radiant fancy, the magnificent isolated

Less

pictures of Macaulay's elaborate writings; but has far less of the air of effort and of mannerism. It is inferior to that of Hazlitt, alike in solidity and in splendour. It has not his fierce sincerity, his intense but sinister acuteness; his discrimination, infallible as an instinct; his direct and masculine vigour; but, on the other hand, it is not disfigured by his fits of spleen, his bursts of egotistical passion, his deliberate paradoxes, his sudden breaks, his ungainly apostrophes, his distortions, fantasies, and frenzies,—the "pimples of red and blue corruption," which now and then bestud his uneasy and uneven, yet brilliant page. As specimens of pure and perfect English, of refined sense, expressed in lucid language, and studded with modest and magnificent ornaments, Jeffrey has produced few compositions equal to those by which Robert Hall irradiated the early pages of The Eclectic Review. Nor has his criticism the pith and profundity of Foster; nor the chary but precious encomium, the gorgeous diffusion, the unearthly stand of laughing superiority to his author, assumed by Thomas Carlyle. But he is incomparably more versatile and vivacious than the first, has not the cumbrous march of the second, and is totally free from the unfathomable obscurities, and wild Babylonish dialect of the third.

The day, we trust, is near, when, like Sidney Smith, Macaulay, and Carlyle, this accomplished man will do himself and his fame the justice of collecting his principal articles in The Edinburgh Review, in The Edinburgh Magazine, in The Scotsman newspaper, &c., along with his speeches at the bar, and at public meetings, into some fixed and permanent shape. And when he has done so, we may affirm that he has reared a monument which shall only perish when the steam engine, which he has eulogized, has ceased its Titanic play, ceased to "pick up a pin and rend an oak, cut steel

into ribbons, and propel a vessel against the fury of the winds and waves ;" and when that principle of beauty, which he has so finely analyzed, has withered from the grass and the flower, and the deep soul of man itself.*

In the commencement of our sketch, we called the subject of it a philosopher; and in employing with regard to him this term, we are justified, not merely by that spirit of refined and subtle thinking which pervades his writings, but by one distinct contribution he has made to metaphysical science. We are aware that, in his theory of the beautiful, he may not claim the merit of originality; nor can Alison. For, to go no farther back, his conception of beauty, which represents it as consisting chiefly in trains of thought and feeling, is evidently implied in that gorgeous dream-the Berkleian theory, which, resolving the universe into Mind, of course included, in the same daring analysis, all its colours, and forms, and landscapes, and soft or stormy sounds: as well as announced in Akenside's celebrated lines, beginning

'Tis Mind alone, bear witness, Earth and Heaven!

But what we mean, in ascribing to Lord Jeffrey the credit of this addition to our metaphysical truth, is, that he first put the theory upon solid ground. He first, redeeming it from the verbiage of Alison, on the one hand, and the dim, dreamy touch of the Berkleians on the other, made it at once intelligible and generally popular; and he became, if not the richest and most copious, the most distinct, succinct, memorable, and eloquent expounder of the astonishing truth. He first fully reconciled us, by his subtle argument and his

Since the above was written, we are glad to observe that Lord Jeffrey has collected his articles in The Edinburgh Review, into a separate publication.