"For the English poets, I will let you off at present with Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Shakespeare; and remember, always in books, keep the best company. Don't read a line of Ovid till you have mastered Virgil; nor a line of Thomson till you have exhausted Pope; nor of Massinger, till you are familiar with Shakespeare."
He thought Locke "a fine, satisfactory sort of a fellow, but very long-winded"; considered Horace Walpole's "the best wit ever published in the shape of letters"; and dismissed Madame de Sévigné as "very much over-praised." Of Montaigne he says—"He thinks aloud, that is his great merit, but does not think remarkably well. Mankind has improved in thinking and writing since that period."
It was, of course, part of his regular occupation to deal with new books in the Edinburgh; and, apart from these formal reviews, his letters are full of curious comments. In 1814 he declines to read the Edinburgh's criticism of Wordsworth, because "the subject is to me so very uninteresting." In the same year he writes:—
"I think very highly of Waverley, and was inclined to suspect, in reading it, that it was written by Miss Scott of Ancrum."
In 1818 he wrote about The Heart of Midlothian:—
"I think it excellent—quite as good as any of his novels, excepting that in which Claverhouse is introduced, and of which I forget the name…. He repeats his characters, but it seems they will bear repetition. Who can read the novel without laughing and crying twenty times?"
In 1820:—
"Have you read Ivanhoe? It is the least dull, and the most easily read through, of all Scott's novels; but there are many more powerful."
Later in the same year:—
"I have just read The Abbot; it is far above common novels, but of very inferior execution to his others, and hardly worth reading. He has exhausted the subject of Scotland, and worn out the few characters that the early periods of Scotch history could supply him with. Meg Merrilies appears afresh in every novel."