much counter to the general character of the nation to be very much followed; and undoubtedly the greater and better part of their writers turned rather to us for hints and lessons to guide them in their ambitious career. There was a greater original affinity in the temper and genius of the two nations; and, in addition to that consideration, our great authors were indisputably at once more original and less classical than those of France. England, however, we are sorry to say, could furnish abundance of bad as well as of good models; and even the best were peril. ous enough for rash imitators. As it happened, however, the worst were most generally selected; and the worst parts of the good. Shakespeare was admired; but more for his flights of fancy, his daring improprieties, his trespasses on the borders of absurdity, than for the infinite sagacity and rectifying good sense by which he redeemed those extravagances, or even the profound tenderness and simple pathos which alternated with the lofty soaring or dazzling imagery of his style. Altogether, however, Shakespeare was beyond their rivalry; and although Schiller has dared, and not ingloriously, to emulate his miracles, it was plainly to other merits and other rivalries that the body of his ingenious countrymen aspired. The ostentatious absurdity, the affected oddity, the pert familiarity, the broken style and exaggerated sentiment of Tristram Shandy; the mawkish morality, dawdling details, and interminable agonies of Richardson; the vulgar adventures and homely, though at the same time fantastical, speculations of John Buncle and others of his forgotten class, found far more favour in their eyes. They were original, startling, unclassical, and puzzling. They excited curiosity by not being altogether intelligible; effectually excluded monotony by the rapidity and violence of their transitions, and promised to rouse the most torpid sensibility by the violence and perseverance with which they thundered at the heart. They were the very things, in short, which the German originals were in search of; and they were not slow, therefore, in adopting and improving on them. In order to make them thoroughly their own, they had only to exaggerate their peculiarities; to mix up with them a certain allowance of their old visionary philosophy, misty metaphysics, and superstitious visions; and to introduce a few crazy sententious theorists, to sprinkle over the whole a seasoning of rash speculation on morality and the fine arts.

(From the Edinburgh Review, August 1825.) Burns and Wordsworth.

He

Our other remark is of a more limited application, and is addressed chiefly to the followers and patrons of that new school of poetry, against which we have thought it our duty to neglect no opportunity of testifying. Those gentlemen are outrageous for simplicity; and we beg leave to recommend to them the simplicity of Burns. has copied the spoken language of passion and affection, with infinitely more fidelity than they have ever done, on all occasions which properly admitted of such adaptation; but he has not rejected the helps of elevated language and habitual associations, nor debased his composition by an affectation of babyish interjections, and all the puling expletives of an old nursery-maid's vocabulary. They may look long enough among his nervous and manly lines before they find any 'Good lacks!'-'Dear hearts!' -or 'As a body may says,' in them; or any stuff about dancing daffodils and sister Emmelines. Let them think with what infinite contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of Alice Fell and her duffle

cloak, of Andrew Jones and the half-crown, or of Little Dan without breeches, and his thievish grandfather. Let them contrast their own fantastical personages of hysterical schoolmasters and sententious leech-gatherers with the authentic rustics of Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night, and his inimitable songs; and reflect on the different reception which those personifications have met with from the public. Though they will not be reclaimed from their puny affectations by the example of their learned predecessors, they may, perhaps, submit to be admonished by a self-taught and illiterate poet, who drew from Nature far more directly than they can do, and produced something so much liker the admired copies of the masters whom they have abjured.

(From the Edinburgh Review, January 1809)

Scott's Poetic Genius.

He

In the choice of his subjects, for example, he does not attempt to interest merely by fine observation or pathetic sentiment, but takes the assistance of a story, and enlists the reader's curiosity among his motives for attention. Then his characters are all selected from the most common dramatis persona of poetry-kings, warriors, knights, outlaws, nuns, minstrels, secluded damsels, wizards, and true lovers. He never ventures to carry us into the cottage of the modern peasant, like Crabbe or Cowper; nor into the bosom of domestic privacy, like Campbell; nor among creatures of the imagination, like Southey or Darwin. Such personages, we readily admit, are not in themselves so interesting or striking as those to whom Mr Scott has devoted himself; but they are far less familiar in poetry, and are therefore more likely, perhaps, to engage the attention of those to whom poetry is familiar. In the management of the passions, again, Mr Scott appears to have pursued the same popular and comparatively easy course. He has raised all the most familiar and poetical emotions, by the most obvious aggravations and in the most compendious and judicious ways. has dazzled the reader with the splendour, and even warmed him with the transient heat of various affections; but he has nowhere fairly kindled him with enthusiasm or melted him into tenderness. Writing for the world at large, he has wisely abstained from attempting to raise any passion to a height to which worldly people could not be transported, and contented himself with giving his reader the chance of feeling as a brave, kind, and affectionate gentleman must often feel in the ordinary course of his existence, without trying to breathe into him either that lofty enthusiasm which disdains the ordinary business and amusements of life, or that quiet and deep sensibility which unfits for most of its pursuits. With regard to diction and imagery, too, it is quite obvious that Mr Scott has not aimed at writing either in a very pure or a very consistent style. He seems to have been anxious only to strike, and to be easily and universally understood; and, for this purpose, to have culled the most glittering and conspicuous expressions of the most popular authors, and to have interwoven them in splendid confusion with his own nervous diction and irregular versification. Indifferent whether he coins or borrows, and drawing with equal freedom on his memory and his imagination, he goes boldly forward, in full reliance on a never-failing abundance; and dazzles, with his richness and variety, even those who are most apt to be offended with his glare and irregularity. There is nothing in Mr Scott of the severe and majestic style of Milton, or of the terse and fine composition of Pope, or

of the elaborate elegance and melody of Campbell, or even of the flowing and redundant diction of Southey. But there is a medley of bright images and glowing words, set carelessly and loosely together—a diction, tinged successively with the careless richness of Shakespeare, the harshness and antique simplicity of the old romances, the homeliness of vulgar ballads and anecdotes, and the sentimental glitter of the most modern poetry; passing from the borders of the ludicrous to those of the sublime, alternately minute and energetic, sometimes artificial and frequently negligent, but always full of spirit and vivacity, abounding in images that are striking, at first sight, to minds of every contexture, and never expressing a sentiment which it cost the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend.

can

Such seem to be the leading qualities that have contributed to Mr Scott's popularity; and as some of them are obviously of a kind to diminish his merit in the eyes of more fastidious judges, it is but fair to complete this view of his peculiarities by a hasty notice of such of them as entitle him to unqualified admiration; and here it is impossible not to be struck with that vivifying spirit of strength and animation which pervades all the inequali ties of his composition, and keeps constantly on the mind of the reader the impression of great power, spirit, and intrepidity. There is nothing cold, creeping, or feeble in all Mr Scott's poetry; no laborious littleness or puling classical affectation. He has his failures, indeed, like other people; but he always attempts vigorously, and never fails in his immediate object without accomplishing something far beyond the reach of an ordinary writer. Even when he wanders from the paths of pure taste, he leaves behind him the footsteps of a powerful genius, and moulds the most humble of his materials into a form worthy of a nobler substance. Allied to this inherent vigour and animation, and in a great degree derived from it, is that air of facility and freedom which adds so peculiar a grace to most of Mr Scott's compositions. There is certainly no living poet whose works seem to come from him with so much ease, or who so seldom appears to labour, even in the most burdensome parts of his performance. He seems, indeed, never to think either of himself or his reader, but to be completely identified and lost in the personages with whom he is occupied; and the attention of the reader is consequently either transferred, unbroken, to their adventures, or, if it glance back for a moment to the author, it is only to think how much more might be done by putting forth that strength at full, which has, without effort, accomplished so many wonders. It is owing partly to these qualities, and partly to the great variety of his style, that Mr Scott is much less frequently tedious than any other bulky poet with whom we are acquainted. His store of images is so copious that he never dwells upon one long enough to produce weariness in the reader; and, even when he deals in borrowed or in tawdry wares, the rapidity of his transitions, and the transient glance with which he is satisfied as to each, leave the critic no time to be offended, and hurry him forward, along with the multitude, enchanted with the brilliancy of the exhibition. Thus, the very frequency of his deviations from pure taste comes, in some sort, to constitute their apology; and the profusion and variety of his faults to afford a new proof of his genius.

(From the Edinburgh Review, August 1810.)

Keats.

We have never happened to see either of these volumes [Endymion (1818); and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other Poems (1820)] till very lately, and have been exceedingly struck with the genius they display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. That imitation of our old writers, and especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry; and few of its blossoms are either more profuse of sweetness or richer in promise than this which is now before us. Mr Keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. They are full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. They manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first attempt. But we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they are flushed all over with the rich flights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry that even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present. The models upon which he has formed himself in the Endymion, the earliest and by much the most considerable of his poems, are obviously The Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher and The Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson, the exquisite metres and inspired diction of which he has copied with great boldness and fidelity, and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart to the whole piece that true rural and poetical airwhich breathes only in them and in Theocritus-which is at once homely and majestic, luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights and sounds and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of Elysium. His subject has the disadvantage of being mythological; and in this respect, as well as on account of the raised and rapturous tone it consequently assumes, his poem, it may be thought, would be better compared to the Comus and the Arcades of Milton, of which, also, there are many traces of imitation. The great distinction, however between him and these divine authors is, that imagination in them is subordinate to reason and judg ment, while with him it is paramount and supremethat their ornaments and images are employed to embellish and recommend just sentiments, engaging incidents, and natural characters, while his are poured out without measure or restraint, and with no apparent design but to unburden the breast of the author, and give vent to the overflowing vein of his fancy. The thin and scanty tissue of his story is merely the light framework on which his florid wreaths are suspended; and while his imaginations go rambling and entangling themselves everywhere, like wild honeysuckles, all idea of sober reason, and plan, and consistency is utterly forgotten, and 'strangled in their waste fertility.' A great part of the work, indeed, is written in the strangest and most fantastical manner that can be imagined. It seems as if the author had ventured everything that occurred to him in the shape of a glittering image or striking expression; taken the first word that presented itself to make up a rhyme, and then made that word the germ of a new cluster of images, a hint for a new excursion of the fancy; and so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he came, and heedless

whither he was going, till he had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as they extended, and were only harmonised by the brightness of their tints and the graces of their forms. In this rash and headlong career he has, of course, many lapses and failures. There is no work, accordingly, from which a malicious critic could cull more matter for ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or absurd passages. But we do not take that to be our office, and must beg leave on the contrary to say that any one who on this account would represent the whole poem as despicable must either have no notion of poetry or no regard to truth.

(From the Edinburgh Review, August 1820.)

Wordsworth.

I have spoken in many places rather too bitterly and confidently of the faults of Mr Wordsworth's poetry; and forgetting that, even on my own view of them, they were but faults of taste or venial self-partiality, have sometimes visited them, I fear, with an asperity which should be reserved for objects of moral reprobation. If I were now to deal with the whole question of his poetical merits, though my judgment might not be substantially different, I hope I should repress the greater part of these vivacités of expression. And indeed so strong has been my feeling in this way, that, considering how much I have always loved many of the attributes of his Genius, and how entirely I respect his Character, it did at first occur to me whether it was quite fitting that, in my old age and his, I should include in this publication any of those critiques which may have formerly given pain or offence to him or his admirers. But when I reflected that the mischief, if there really ever was any, was long ago done, and that I still retain, in substance, the opinions which I should now like to have seen more gently expressed, I felt that to omit all notice of them on the present occasion might be held to import a retraction which I am as far as possible from intending, or even be represented as a very shabby way of backing out of sentiments which should either be manfully persisted in or openly renounced and abandoned as untenable.

I finally resolved, therefore, to reprint my review of The Excursion; which contains a pretty full view of my griefs and charges against Mr Wordsworth; set forth too, I believe, in a more temperate strain than most of my other inculpations—and of which I think I may now venture to say further, that if the faults are unsparingly noted, the beauties are not penuriously or grudgingly allowed, but commended to the admiration of the reader with at least as much heartiness and good-will.

But I have also reprinted a short paper on the same author's White Doe of Rylstone-in which there certainly is no praise or notice of beauties to set against the very unqualified censures of which it is wholly made up. I have done this, however, not merely because I adhere to these censures, but chiefly because it seemed necessary to bring me fairly to issue with those who may not concur in them. I can easily understand that many whose admiration of the Excursion or the Lyrical Ballads rests substantially on the passages which I too should join in admiring may view with greater indulgence than I can do the tedious and flat passages with which they are interspersed, and may consequently think my censure of these works a great deal too harsh and uncharitable. Between such persons and me, therefore, there may be no

radical difference of opinion or contrariety as to principles of judgment. But if there be any who actually admire this White Doe of Rylstone, or Peter Bell [, or] The Waggoner, or the Lamentations of Martha Rae, or the Sonnets [upon the Punishment of Death, there can be no such ambiguity or means of reconcilement. Now I have been assured not only that there are such persons, but that almost all those who seek to exalt Mr Wordsworth as the founder of a new school of poetry consider these as by far his best and most characteristic productions, and would at once reject from their communion any one who did not acknowledge in them the traces of a high inspiration. Now I wish it to be understood that when I speak with general intolerance or impatience of the school of Mr Wordsworth, it is to the school holding these tenets and applying these tests that I refer and I really do not see how I could better explain the grounds of my dissent from their doctrines than by republishing my remarks on this White Doe.

(Note to review of The Excursion, November 1814: Contributions, vol. ii., ed. 1846, pp. 504-5.)

This [The White Doe], we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume; and though it was scarcely to be expected, we confess, that Mr Wordsworth, with all his ambition, should so soon have attained to that distinction, the wonder may perhaps be diminished when we state that it seems to us to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that school might be supposed to have devised on purpose to make it ridiculous; and when we first took it up, we could not help suspecting that some ill-natured critic had actually taken this harsh method of instructing Mr Wordsworth, by example, in the nature of those errors, against which our precepts had been so often directed in vain. We had not gone far, however, till we felt intuitively that nothing in the nature of a joke could be so insupportably dull, and that this must be the work of one who earnestly believed it to be a pattern of pathetic simplicity, and gave it out as such to the admiration of all intelligent readers. In this point of view, the work may be regarded as curious at least, if not in some degree interesting; and at all events it must be instructive to be made aware of the excesses into which superior understandings may be betrayed by long self-indulgence, and the strange extravagances into which they may run when under the influence of that intoxication which is produced by unrestrained admiration of themselves. This poetical intoxication, indeed, to pursue the figure a little farther, seems capable of assuming as many forms as the vulgar one which arises from wine; and it appears to require as delicate a management to make a man a good poet by the help of the one as to make him a good companion by means of the other. In both cases, a little mistake as to the dose or the quality of the inspiring fluid may make him absolutely outrageous, or lull him over into the most profound stupidity, instead of brightening up the hidden stores of his genius: and truly we are concerned to say that Mr Wordsworth seems hitherto to have been unlucky in the choice of his liquor-or of his bottle-holder. In some of his odes and ethic exhortations he was exposed to the public in a state of incoherent rapture and glorious delirium to which we think we have seen a parallel

among the humbler lovers of jollity. In the Lyrical

Ballads he was exhibited on the whole in a vein of very pretty deliration; but in the poem before us he appears in a state of low and maudlin imbecility which would not have misbecome Master Silence himself in the close of a social day. Whether this unhappy result is to be ascribed to any adulteration of his Castalian cups, or to the unlucky choice of his company over them, we cannot presume to say. It may be that he has dashed his Hippocrene with too large an infusion of lake water, or assisted its operation too exclusively by the study of the ancient historical ballads of the north countrie.' That there are palpable imitations of the style and manner of those venerable compositions in the work before us is indeed undeniable; but it unfortunately happens that while the hobbling versification, the mean diction, and flat stupidity of these models are very exactly copied, and even improved upon, in this imitation, their rude energy, manly simplicity, and occasional felicity of expression have totally disappeared; and instead of them a large allowance of the author's own metaphysical sensibility and mystical wordiness is forced into an unnatural combination with the borrowed beauties which have just been mentioned.

(From the Edinburgh Review, October 1815.)

For the life, the indispensable authority is Lord Cockburn's Life, with Selections from his Correspondence (2 vols. 8vo. 1852). Supplementary facts are to be gleaned in the correspondence and writings of Sydney Smith, Horner, Moore, Hazlitt, Macvey Napier, Carlyle, and in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. Jeffrey's own selections from the Edinburgh Review appeared first in 4 vols. 8vo. (London, 1844), then in 3 vols. 8vo. (London, 1846), and later in 1 vol. 8vo. (London, 1853)-under the title, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. The extracts given above are reprinted from the threevolume edition. A few of his political speeches-for example, On Catholic Claims and on The Reform Bill-were published in pamphlet form before his death.

G. GREGORY SMITH.

Thomas de Quincey

was born in Manchester on 15th August 1785. He claimed descent from the Norman family of De Quincey which had come over with the Conqueror; but his father was plain Thomas Quincey, author of a Short Tour in the Midland Counties (1775), and latterly a successful merchant in Fountain Street, Manchester. Young Thomas's pride of family showed itself early, for in his fifteenth year he informed George III., during a chance interview in Frogmore Gardens, that he was not of Huguenot origin, as the king had suggested. The resumption of the 'de' was an article of honour with him, though his mother was persuaded by her stricter friends of the Hannah More set to denounce it as a worldly vanity. We have particulars in the autobiographic Sketches of his very earliest years near Manchester, first at The Farm, and then (? 1792-96) at the house of Greenhay, which his father had just built but did not live to enjoy. How far these episodes are authentic it is impossible to say, but it is unnecessary to suspect them, or those of later periods, as the imaginings of the 'Opium-Eater.' Some have been tested and found to be accurate; and it must not be forgotten that long before he discovered the 'divine' drug near 'the stately Pantheon' he had

been a child of visions. Of the truth of his account of his Introduction to the World of Strife, a humorous-pathetic picture of the rude shocks which his sensitive nature received at the hands of his boisterous 'big brother' William, there can be no doubt. The terrors of the kinglet of Gombroon before the monarch of Tigrosylvania, the court-martials of the major-general by the 'awful commander-in-chief,' must have passed for honest autobiography even if we had known nothing of the real skirmishes with the factory boys of Manchester or the escapades at Greenhay. In 1796, in the gentler company of his brother Richard ('Pink'), he went to the grammar-school at Bath, where he became the most promising pupil, especially in Latin verses; but illness, produced by a blow on the head, interrupted his training. On his recovery he was sent by his mother to a private school at Winkfield, whose headmaster had attracted her by his 'religious character.' A holiday spent next year round Eton and in Ireland with a boy-friend, Lord Westport, and thereafter at Lord Carbery's house at Laxton in Northamptonshire, strengthened a natural habit of restlessness; and he took ill to being sent, in 1800, to the grammar-school at Manchester, from which, after eighteen months' misery, he ran away. For four months he wandered about in North Wales, living a sort of gipsy life, sleeping sometimes in inns (when his weekly guinea held out), more often on the fields; writing love-letters for illiterate wenches, and finding friends everywhere. In November 1802 he coached to London to taste the freedom of the town, to feel like, but less wholesome, hardships, and to find friends there too, in the childslave at Mr Brunell's den in Soho, in Brunell himself, and in poor Ann, the street-walker. His mother and her brother, Colonel Penson, who had agreed to his wandering plans and had made him the allowance, now interfered, and by October 1803 had coerced him into the more respectable seclusion of Worcester College, Oxford. Of his life there we know little; but we hear of his sallies to London-in one of which, on a wet 'sad' Sunday in 1804, he bought his first bottle of laudanum in Oxford Street; and of his excursion in 1807 to Bridgwater, where he met Coleridge. He did not return to Oxford, but accompanied Mrs Coleridge from Bristol on her journey northwards to Southey's house in Cumberland. He saw Wordsworth at Grasmere and Southey at Greta Hall, returned to Bristol, and then went to London to hear Coleridge's lectures at the Royal Institution, to have a round of opera, and generally to amuse himself with friends, old and new. A second visit to the Lakes followed in the winter of 1808-9; and in November 1809 he became tenant of Wordsworth's old cottage at Townend, Grasmere, where he devoted himself to miscellaneous but close study, and enjoyed the companionship of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wilson of Elleray ('Christopher North'), and other literary friends. By 1813 he had become

val, in which he

had been attracted

by Ricardo's Principles, brought forth no more than a fragment, Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy, which he did not complete. In 1819 he undertook the editing of a local Tory journal, The Westmoreland Gazette. It was not till September 1821, in the pages of the London Magazine, that he broke his silence with the first instalment of the Confessions of an Opium Eater, being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar, followed, during his stay in London, by an in

other lodgings, which he 'snowed up' with papers and books. He resided in Glasgow between March 1841 and June 1843, and for the greater part of 1847, first as the guest of his friends Professors Nichol and Lushington, but for most of the time in lodgings at No. 79 Renfield Street. His writing in Edinburgh was mainly for Blackwood's Magazine, and after 1834 for Tait's, to which he contributed the autobiographic Sketches. His activity was great, despite his indifferent health, and it was at

termittent series of articles on miscellaneous subjects, including the Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected (1823) and an attack on Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister (1824). In 1825 he prepared a free version of Walladmor, a poor Leipzig contribution in the genre of the Waverley Novels; and in that year he went to the north again, to live, partly at Grasmere, but with increasing frequency in Edinburgh, where he found literary opportunity in Blackwood's Magazine and the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. He summoned his wife and children thither in 1830, and remained there almost continuously till his death. He moved his family from house to house, sometimes in the city, sometimes in the outskirts; after the death of his wife (1837) he found a home for his children at Lasswade. He did his literary work in rooms at No. 42 Lothian Street, but he occasionally fled to

de

this period that he produced some of his more notable papers-Suspiria Profundis (1845); Joan of Arc, the review of Schlosser's Literary History, and The Spanish Military Nun (1847); The English MailCoach and The Vision of Sudden Death (1849). His original romance, Klosterheim, appeared in 1832, and his Logic of Political Economy in 1844. After 1849 nearly all his papers appeared in the recently founded magazine, Hogg's Instructor (renamed later The Titan); and in 1850 he was engaged by the publisher, James Hogg, to prepare a collective edition

of his writings. The first volume appeared in 1853, with the title Selections, Grave and Gay, from Writings Published and Unpublished, and the fourteenth and last was printed in 1860. This task was the main, if not the sole, occupation of his closing years. Since 1848 his daily allowance of opium had been reduced, but his health had not improved. Yet his vitality had been great, for when the restless little man passed away in his seventy-fifth year (8th December 1859), he appeared to his physician and friends to make the peaceful and natural submission of sheer old age.

De Quincey's reputation, like Jeffrey's, is based exclusively on a long series of miscellaneous papers contributed to periodicals. His work has had a more permanent popularity, because of the wider range of subject and the greater measure of imagination allowed by the 'Magazine' as con