But we need not have recourse to the enthusiasm of a foreigner for the refutation of D'Israeli's paradox. Walter Savage Landor, a writer of the highest intellectual range, has given us, in the following words, his estimate of the truth of history :

"We make a bad bargain when we exchange poetry for truth in the affairs of ancient times, and by no means a good one in any.”—Pericles and Aspasia.

And again :

"Perhaps at no time will there be written, by the most accurate and faithful historian, so much of truth as untruth." -Ibid.

To these I shall add the testimony of a writer of very little weight in my judgment, but whose authority is of great value in the eyes of D'Israeli : "Memoirs are often dictated by the fiercest spirit of personal rancour, and then histories are composed from memoirs. Where is the truth?" -This writer is no other than Isaac D'Israeli himself, but Isaac D'Israeli uninfluenced by the spirit of cant.

In the foregoing remarks I have endeavoured to sketch the condition of criticism in the nineteenth century. Of its unsettled state, its contradictory decisions, and its utter worthlessness as a criterion of public taste, the reader will be able to judge by a few samples from the great masters of the art. I shall first give the name

of the author criticised, and then the judgments and names of the critics.

Sir Walter Scott.

"Scotland is proud of her great national minstrel; and as long as she is Scotland will wash and warm the laurels round his brow with rains and winds that will ever keep brightening their glossy verdure. The truth is, that Scotland had forgotten her own history, till Sir Walter burnished it all up till it glowed again—it is hard to say whether in his poetry or in his prose the brightest-and the past became the present. Scott brought his power to bear on his own people, and has achieved an immortal triumph."- WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North.

"There is something meretricious in Sir Walter's ballad rhymes. There is a glittering veil thrown over the features of Nature and of old Romance. The details are lost or shaped into flimsy and insipid decorum; and the truth of feeling and of circumstance into a tinkling sound, a tinsel common-place. Sir Walter has either not the faculty or not the will to impregnate his subject by an effort of pure invention. The execution also is much upon a par with the more ephemeral effusions of the press. It is light, agreeable, effeminate, diffuse. As to the rest, and compared with true and great poets, our Scottish minstrel is but a 'metre ballad-monger.' The definition of his poetry is pleasing superficiality. We would rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord Byron's 'Heaven and Earth,' or one of Wordsworth's fancies and goodnights, than all his epics."-HAZLITT. The Spirit of the Age.

William Wordsworth.

"In describing external Nature as she is, no poet perhaps has excelled Wordsworth-not even Thomson: in embuing her and making her pregnant with spiritualities, till the

mighty mother teems with beauty far more beauteous than ever she had rejoiced in till such communion-he excels all the brotherhood. Therein lies his especial glory, and therein the immortal evidences of the might of his creative imagination. The 'Excursion' is a series of poems all swimming in the light of poetry; some of them sweet and simple; some elegant and graceful; some beautiful and most lovely; some of strength and state; some majestic; some magnificent; some sublime."-WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North.

"The 'Excursion' is longer, weaker, and tamer than any of Mr. Wordsworth's other productions, with less boldness of originality and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered so prettily in the Lyrical Ballads between silliness and pathos. The volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly, we should characterise as a tissue of moral and devotional ravings, in which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very simple and familiar ideas; but with such an accompaniment of long words, long sentences, and unwieldy phrases, and such a hubbub of strained raptures and fantastical sublimities, that it is often difficult for the most skilful and attentive student to obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning- and altogether impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is about. It abounds in mawkish sentiment, inflated description, and details of preposterous minuteness; in truisms, cloudy, wordy, and inconceivably prolix; in rapturous mysticism, mock majesty, and solemn verbosity; in revolting incongruities, and an utter disregard of probability or nature; in puerile singularity, and an affected passion for simplicity and for humble life, most awkwardly combined with a taste for mystical refinements and all the gorgeousness of obscure phraseology."—JEFFREY, Essays.

Samuel Rogers.

"There is the 'Pleasures of Memory'-an elegant, graceful, beautiful, pensive, and pathetic poem, which it does one's eyes good to gaze on, one's ears good to listen to, one's very

fingers good to touch, so smooth is the versification and the wire-wove paper. Never will the 'Pleasures of Memory' be forgotten till the world is in its dotage."-WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North.

"The transition from these to Mr. Rogers's 'Pleasures of Memory' is not far. He is a very lady-like poet: he is an elegant but feeble writer. He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is full of enigmas with no meaning to them; is studiously inverted, and scrupulously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly because no particle, line, or syllable of them reads like prose. He differs from Milton in this respect, who is accused of having inserted a number of prosaic lines in 'Paradise Lost.' This kind of poetry, which is a more minute and inoffensive species of the Della Cruscan, is like the game of asking what one's thoughts are like. It is a tortuous, tottering, wriggling, fidgety translation of everything from the vulgar tongue into all the tantalizing, teasing, tripping, lisping, mimminee-pimminee of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction. You have nothing like truth of nature or simplicity of expression. The fastidious and languid reader is never shocked by meeting, from the rarest chance in the world, with a single homely phrase or intelligible idea. You cannot see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for the finery, the picture for the varnish. The whole is refined and frittered away into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancy and tremulous imbecility. There is no other fault to be found with the 'Pleasures of Memory,' than a want of taste and genius."HAZLITT. Lectures on the English Poets.

Thomas Campbell.

"What shall we say of the Pleasures of Hope'? That the harp from which that music breathed was an Eolian harp placed in the window of a high hall, to catch airs from heaven, when heaven was glad, as well she might be, with such moon and such stars, and streamering half the region

with a magnificent aurora borealis. Now the music deepens into a majestic march-now it swells into a holy hymn; and now it dies away elegiac-like, as if mourning over a tomb. Vague, indefinite, uncertain, dream-like, and visionary all; but never else than beautiful; and ever and anon, we know not why, sublime. In his youth Campbell lived where distant isles could hear the loud Corbrechtan roar,' and sometimes his poetry is like that whirlpool-the sound as of the wheels of many chariots."- WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North.

"Campbell's Pleasures of Hope' is of the same school, in which a painful attention is paid to the expression, in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry. There are painters who trust more to the setting of their pictures than to the truth of the likeness. Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on superfine wove paper; to have a disproportionate eye to points and commas, and a dread of errors of the press. He writes according to established etiquette. He offers the muses no violence. When he launches a sentiment that you think will float him triumphantly for once to the bottom of the stanza, he stops short at the end of the first or second line, and stands shivering on the brink of beauty, afraid to trust himself to the fathomless abyss. Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum. His very circumspection betrays him. The poet, as well as the woman, that deliberates, is undone. He is much like a man whose heart fails him just as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging himself out of it, when it is too late. Mr. Campbell, too, often maims and mangles his ideas before they are full-formed, to form them to the Procrustes' bed of Criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in the birth, lest it should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review.'"-HAZLITT. Lectures on the English Poets.