[554]. Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, London, pp. 36-63 of this the one vol. ed., 1853. The “Beauty” itself requires very little notice. It is an ingenious variation upon Alison, whose book it reviews, praises, and supports, with some unfairness to Gerard. But it abstains, almost comically and not uninstructively to an impartial thinker on æsthetics, from any definite literary applications.
[555]. He makes indeed an awkward slip by linking Machiavel as a contemporary with Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, and Galileo; but it is only recently, if even recently, that literary history has been carefully attended to, and Coleridge himself makes slips quite as bad.
[556]. How much of this was got from his author herself I leave to others to decide. A comparison with what has been said of her supra may be “for thoughts.”
[557]. A fuller development of view about Jeffrey as a critic may be found in the present writer’s Essays in English Literature, First Series, pp. 100-134. Articles of his own specially worth examining are, besides the “Staël,” “Cowper,” “Ford,” “Keats,” and “Campbell’s Specimens,” those on W. Meister (very curious and interesting), Richardson, Scott, and Byron (very numerous and full of piquancies), Crabbe, Wordsworth of course (though with as much wisdom as good feeling he kept much of the most offensive matter both on Wordsworth and Southey out), and Burns. In regard to the latter I cannot help thinking that he played the Advocatus Diaboli better than either Mr Arnold, Mr Shairp, or my late friend Mr Henley.
[558]. The popularity, in late years, of the singularly uncritical words “sympathetic” and “unsympathetic” in describing Criticism, would of itself point to this necessity. It would seem impossible for a large number of persons to “like” otherwise than “grossly” in Dryden’s sense, or to imagine that any one else can like delicately, with discrimination, in the old sense “nicely.” A “sympathetic” notice or criticism is one which pours unmixed cataracts of what the cooks call oiled butter all over the patient: a notice that questions this part of him, rejects that, but gives due value to the gold and the silver and the precious stones, while discarding the hay and the stubble, is “unsympathetic.” Many years (many lustres even, alas!) ago, an old friend and colleague of mine, since distinguished in his own country as a critic, M. Paul Stapfer, complained that Englishmen, and still more Englishwomen, had only two critical categories—the “dry” and the “pretty.” These were unsatisfactory enough, but I think they were better than “sympathetic” and “unsympathetic” as now often used.
[559]. P. 5, in the convenient 1-vol. reprint of Messrs Ward and Lock (London: n. d.)
[560]. On the same page, ed. cit.
[561]. Who loved the Vulgate.
[562]. I decline to sully these pages with it: let it go to its own place, buckled neck and heels with Rapin’s on Nausicaa.
[563]. We could abandon Owen Felltham to him with more equanimity if he did not describe, as “vile English, or properly no English,” such words as “nested,” “parallel” as a verb, and “uncurtain,” all excellent English of the best brand and vintage, formed on the strictest and most idiomatic patents of analogy. There is still far too much criticastry and pedanticulism (here’s for them!) of this kind about, and men like Hallam are very mainly responsible for it. Even “obnubilate,” to which he also objects, is a perfectly good word, on all-fours with “compensate,” which he himself uses in the same context, though less usual. A sovereign of just weight, fineness, and stamp is none the worse for having been little circulated: nor is a word.