[896]. In an essay originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine for July 1886, and reprinted in Essays in English Literature (3rd. ed., London, 1896).
[897]. As I am not speaking enfarinhadomente about Wilson’s faults, I may fairly protest against an exaggeration of them. It is surely unlucky of Mr Buxton Forman (Keats’ Letters, i. 46, ed. 1900) to talk of Blackwood’s Magazine having “a monopoly of frowsy and unsavoury personal gibes” in “the possession of Christopher North,” when he had himself a few papers earlier cited Hazlitt’s almost Bedlamite Billingsgate against Southey in the Examiner.
[898]. As the 4th vol. of Essays Critical and Imaginative (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1856-57). It follows Wilson’s usual lines of a running study of the poem and those who have written about it. Much of it, as of the essay on the Agamemnon which follows, is occupied by a not uninteresting parallel-collection of translations.
[899]. Literature of Europe, chap. xiv., § 82.
[900]. It will be found in Blackwood’s Magazine, vols. xxxiv., xxxvi., and xxxvii. (Edinburgh, 1833-35).
[901]. For this is one of the metaphors which (as Théophile Gautier boasted of his own, and as so few others can boast) se suivent.
[902]. Ibid., vols. lvii., lviii. (1849).
[903]. Blackwood’s Magazine, vols. lxv.-lxviii. and lxxii. (1849-52).
[904]. There is much good as well as bad criticism here; but it is almost inevitable that the goodness should be obscured to too many tastes, and the bad intensified to almost all, by the setting of High Jinks. Yet Wilson, like Shakespeare according to Collier, “could be very serious,” and his defence of Croker against Macaulay is far more valid than has usually been allowed.
[905]. Essays, i. 387 sq.