Three studies in literature

THREE STUDIES IN LITERATURE
BY LEWIS E. GATES ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1899 All rights reserved Copyright, 1899, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
These Studies were originally introductory essays in volumes of selections from the prose writings of Jeffrey, Newman, and Arnold. The essay on Jeffrey has been rewritten and expanded. My thanks are due to Messrs. Ginn and Co. for the use of the essay on Jeffrey, and to Messrs. Henry Holt and Co. for leave to reprint the essays on Newman and Arnold.
December 15, 1898.




Who now reads Jeffrey? Only those, it may be feared, who are intent on some scholarly purpose or victims of sharp necessity. Yet in 1809 Jeffrey could boast that his articles in the Edinburgh Review were read by fifty thousand thinking people within a month after publication. Jeffrey’s reputation as a critic has run through a picturesquely varied course. During nearly the first half of the century he was, for many eminently intelligent Englishmen, an all but infallible authority in letters and whatever pertained to them. He was Horner’s and Sydney Smith’s “King Jamfray”; he was for Macaulay “more nearly a universal genius than any man of our time.” Even Carlyle declared no critic since Jeffrey’s day “worth naming beside him.” And when that half-national institution, the Encyclopædia Britannica , required in its columns a discussion of the theory of art, Jeffrey it was who was called in as an authority and wrote the article on “Beauty” that, down to 1875, stood as representing authentic English opinion in matters of taste.
Even those who hated Jeffrey admitted his power. “Birds seldom sing,” quoth Allan Cunningham, “when the kite is in the air, and bards dreaded the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as political offenders dreaded the Judge Jeffreys of James the Second.” Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and editor, asserted of Jeffrey that “with little imagination, little genuine wit, and no clear view of any great and central principles of criticism, he ... continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occasionally to delight multitudes of readers, and at one time to hold the temporary fate of authors in his hands.”