Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism

by F. V. N. Painter

The author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt, but ten times more tiresome than his prototype; his nonsense is gratuitous, he writes it for its own sake, and more than rivals the insanity of his master. He writes at random the suggestions of his rhyme without having hardly a complete couplet to endorse a complete idea in the book. If any one should be bold enough to purchase it, and patient enough to get beyond the first book and find any meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair.—Quarterly Review.

WORDSWORTH

The simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay
As soft as evening in his favorite May;
Who warns his friend "to shake off toil and trouble,
And quit his books, for fear of growing double";
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose;
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane,
And Christmas stories, tortured into rhyme,
Contain the essence of the true sublime;
Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an idiot boy,"
A moon-struck silly lad who lost his way,
And, like his bard, confounded night with day;
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the "idiot in his glory,"
Conceive the bard the hero of the story.

Byron in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

CROKER'S EDITION OF BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON

This work has greatly disappointed us. Whatever faults we may have been prepared to find in it, we fully expected that it would be a valuable addition to English literature; that it would contain many curious facts, and many judicious remarks; that the style of the notes would be neat, clear, and precise; and that the typographical execution would be, as in new editions of classical works it ought to be, almost faultless. We are sorry to be obliged to say that the merits of Mr. Croker's performance are on a par with those of a certain leg of mutton on which Dr. Johnson dined, while travelling from London to Oxford, and which he, with characteristic energy, pronounced to be "as bad as bad could be, ill fed, ill killed, ill kept, and ill dressed." This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed.—Macaulay in Edinburgh Review.

CARLYLE

There is in Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of enthusiasm or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected humor, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which is to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery, both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other,—it is the very sword of Goliath.

Saintsbury.