But he would be neither Hartley nor Coleridge if he were not best in the Marginalia, good as the “Massinger and Ford” introduction is in parts. The “Anderson” notes, and those on Shakespeare, deserve the most careful reading: and I shall be much surprised if any competent reader fails to see that the man who wrote them at least had it in him to have made no inadequate thirdsman to his father[[919]] and Hazlitt.

Maginn.

Very few people nowadays, in all probability, think much of “bright, broken Maginn”[[920]] as a critic; and of those few some perhaps associate his criticism chiefly with such examples of it as the article on Grantley Berkeley, which almost excused the retaliation on its unfortunate publisher, or the vain attempt to “bluff” out the Keats matter by ridiculing Adonais. Even as to most of his exercitations in this most unlovely department, or rather corruption, of our art, there is perhaps something to be said for him. He fights, as a rule, not with Lockhart’s dagger of ice-brook temper, nor with Wilson’s smashing bludgeon, but with a kind of horse-whip, stinging indeed enough, but letting out no life and breaking no bones at worst and heaviest, at lightest not much more than switching playfully. Had there, however, been nothing to plead for him but this, there would have been no room for him here. His parody-criticisms But his favourite way of proceeding in his lighter critical articles, though not invented by himself (as it was not of course invented even by Canning and his merry men, from whom Maginn took it), the method of [parody-criticism], is, if not a very high variety, and especially not in the least a convincing one, still one which perhaps deserves a few lines of reference, and of which he was himself decidedly the chief master. These parody-criticisms[[921]] are often quite good-natured, and they exhibit the seamy sides of the various styles in a manner which is critical “after a sort.”

and more serious efforts.

Still, a mere allusion would suffice for them if they stood alone, and Maginn’s paragraph might be completed by observing that he has repaired the absolutely false statement, that “Michael Angelo was a very indifferent poet,” by the far too true one, that “Any modern sermon, after the Litany of the Church of England, is an extreme example of the bathos.”[[922]] But his Essay on Dr Farmer’s Learning of Shakespeare,[[923]] and the much shorter but still substantial Lady Macbeth,[[924]] are by no means to be omitted or merely catalogued. These two pieces show that Maginn, if

only he could have kept his hand from the glass, and his pen from mere gambols or worse, not only might but would have been one of the most considerable of English critics. The goodness, and the various goodness, of both is all the more remarkable because Maginn seems to have owed little or nothing to the influence of Coleridge. Almost the only fault in the first is the hectoring incivility with which Farmer himself is spoken of, and this, as we have seen, is but too old a fault with critics, while it was specially prevalent at this period, and our own is far from guiltless of it. But the sense and learning of the paper are simply admirable: and Maginn’s possession of the last critical secret is almost shown by his wise restraint in arguing that Farmer’s argument for Shakespeare’s ignorance is invalid, without going on, as some would do, and have done, to argue the poet omniscient by learning as well as by genius. As for the Lady Macbeth, the sense is reinforced, and the learning (here not necessary) replaced, by taste and subtlety of the most uncommon kind. I do not know a piece of dramatic character-criticism (no, not the thousand-times-praised thing in Wilhelm Meister) more unerringly delicate and right. And this man, not, as the cackle goes, by “neglect of genius,” by the wicked refusal of patrons to patronise, not by anything of the kind, but by sheer lack of self-command, wasted his time in vulgar journalism at the worst, and with rare exceptions[[925]] in mere sport-making at the best!

We have been occupied since the beginning of this chapter by men who, save in the case of Hartley Coleridge, were closely connected with the periodical press, and owed almost all their communication with the public to it. We now come to a pair, greater than any of them, who were indeed “contributors,” but not contributors mainly.