[544]. Southern afterwards came in contact with Borrow at Madrid. See The Bible in Spain and Dr Knapp’s Life.
[545]. There is none in the dates, but the title-page is different, the former vignette of a gateway (Trinity? “I cannot tell, I am an Oxford man”) disappearing, and being replaced by the editors’ names.
[546]. A so-called “Third Series” (in 2 vols., 1854) can hardly be considered as really forming part of the original, from which it is separated by a thirty years’ interval.
[547]. It is the only adequate thing on him that I know.
[548]. Specially good are, in vol. iv., the dramatic papers; in v., one on Witchcraft; in vi., those on Coryat and Sir T. Urquhart; in vii., on Donne and Ariosto; in ix., on Chaucer (continued later); in x., on Minor French Poetry (Dorat); in xii., on Latin Plays at Cambridge, and one of singular and wide-reaching merit on the Roman Comique; in xv., an interesting tracing of Scott’s quotations in the novels; in xvi., an admirable paper on Shadwell. But there is practically nothing negligible: and good taste, good manners, good temper, and good learning abound throughout.
[550]. His best literary skit, “Bozzy and Piozzi,” deals with the Tour, not the Life.
[551]. The earlier Rolliad is partly, but less, literary. For more on most of these I may refer to an essay of mine, Twenty Years of Political Satire, which originally appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, and it reprinted in Essays in English Literature, 2nd series, London, 1895.
[552]. I do not think it necessary to give Gifford’s prose or periodical criticism a separate place. It is by no means easily separable as such; and if separated I fancy there would be very little to say for it, and that what would have to be said against it is better summed up in the words of no less a political sympathiser and personal friend than Scott. A “cankered carle” cannot be a good critic, any more than a mildewed grape can give good wine. But Gifford was not quite so bad as he has seemed to some; and his editorial work, especially on Jonson, deserves almost the highest praise.
[553]. I know, of course, that even Coleridge spoke unadvisedly about these immortal flowers. But he had got a “philosophical” craze at the moment: and he did not call them “stuff.”