[1147]. In the colonial period not even the untiring industry and the microscopic enthusiasm of Professor Tyler have discovered anything critical. Mr Charles F. Richardson in American Literature, 1607-1885 (New York and London: Putnams, 1887), i. 396, says plumply, “Criticism did not exist in this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nor did it make much showing until the nineteenth century was well advanced.” There is far less of it, for instance, in Washington Irving than one might expect. Perhaps some may think that an exception ought to be made for Channing. But his Essay on Milton, which is the chief critical thing of his known to me, produces that sense of bafflement which, if I remember rightly, Renan expresses in regard to him on other grounds: “We are aware that it is objected to poetry that it gives wrong views of life....” “We gaze on Satan with an awe not unmixed with mysterious pleasure....” &c., &c. With such matter we have known how to deal in the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth it loses significance.
[1148]. The chief source of my direct knowledge of his work of the kind is the collection called Drift-Wood, which I have known for very many years. Somewhat later—the Drift-Wood papers date from before 1840—he inserted critical introductions in his Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845).
[1149]. It fills half the third volume and all the fourth in Mr Ingram’s edition of the works (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1874).
[1150]. In the article on Lever, where some special gadfly seems to have stung Poe.
[1151]. Marg., 76.
[1152]. Ibid., 114.
[1153]. Ibid., 177.
[1154]. He comes perhaps too close to this in his paper on “The Library of Old Authors”; but there was certainly no little provocation in the editing, and even in the selection, of some of the volumes of that always comely and mainly comfortable series.
[1155]. On some minor defects it is not worth while to dwell. Lowell could see that Guest had no ear for verse: yet he was all his life long as impatient as Guest himself of that duly transferred and adapted “classical” system of English prosody which could be easily shown to justify almost all the things he himself liked, and to explain the badness of those which he thought bad. He began this impatience quite early with Poe in the Fable for Critics; and he never shook it off.
[1156]. London, n. d. The Preface is dated 1888.