Selections from the essays of Francis Jeffrey

Front matter

I'Twzz

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ' '

THE ATHEN/tUM PRESS SERIES

Preface

The following Selections from Jeffrey's Essays have a three-fold purpose : first, to illustrate Jeffrey's style and methods as a critic and his most characteristic opinions ; secondly, to give examples of what was in its day deemed the best literary criticism, with a view to suggesting the changes in methods and aims that have since been wrought ; thirdly, to bring together elementary discussions of a few terms and topics in literature which students are always supposed to be familiar with, but which they can hardly find treated in ordinary manuals or reference-books. With these aims in mind it has seemed best to limit the Selections to essays on literature. This limitation ensures unity, and the resulting volume may well be used by classes that are beginning the independent study of literary topics and of methods of criticism.

On the other hand, this limitation prevents the Selections from doing justice to Jeffrey's versatility, and from illustrating satisfactorily certain points on which much stress is laid in the Introduction, — the range of the Edinburgh essays, and their courage and vigor in the treatment of religious, social, and political questions. The reader who wishes illustrations of these points, must consult Jeffrey's four volumes of Contributio7is

IV PREFACE,

to the Edinburgh Review, or turn to the files of the periodical.

The text of the Selections is entire as far as it goes, except in four essays, where omissions are marked bystars ; but every Selection ends, when Jeffrey turns from his discussion of general questions, and begins to deal specifically with the book before him by means of summaries and extracts. It has not been thought worth while to mark this form of incompleteness with stars.

The best short sketch of Jeffrey's life is that of Mr. Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography ; the standard biography is Lord Cockburn'S Life and Corresp07idence of Lord /ejfrey, in two volumes.

The text of the Selections, including punctuation and spelling, is precisely that of the London edition of 1844, save for the correction of a few obvious and trifling misprints.

Harvard University.

December 26, 1893.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction vii

I. Jeffrey's Fame vii

I

During the thirty years after his death Francis Jeffrey was remembered in literature with very httle honor. Those of his essays that were most often recalled were his attacks on the Lake poets ; and as Wordsworth and Coleridge had ultimately persuaded the public, or the larger part of it, to take their poetry at their own valuation, Jeffrey's reputation as a critic suffered proportionally.

Of late years, however, two sets of causes have been tending to gain for Jeffrey a second hearing and to secure for him a fair recognition. In the first place, the mystical view of life, which he found so offensive in Wordsworth and attacked so relentlessly, has been more and more falling into disfavor, and giving place to a positive and scientific habit of thought. The positivism of to-day is not Jeffrey's positivism, and our insensibility to Wordsworth is not Jeffrey's insensibility ; and yet the temper of our time is perhaps nearer like Jeffrey's than like Wordsworth's ; and Jeffrey's frank, comprehensible blunders are nearer tolerable to a latter-day, prose-loving public than are the extravagances and cloudy mysticism of much of the poetry he assails.

Then, in the second place, the mere passage of time has been in Jeffrey's favor ; the historical point of view has largely replaced the partisan point of view in discussions of the early literature of the century, and a viii INTRODUCTION.

scientific recognition of Jeffrey's former prestige has replaced an impatient dislike of his critical opinions. Questions of cause and effect, of action and reaction, of movements and tendencies, have more and more come to the front ; and for a student of problems of this kind Jeffrey is not a quantity that can be neglected.

It is hardly possible to glance through the life of any literary man of the early part of the century without chancing on evidence of Jeffrey's popularity and prestige. Macaulay, for example, was a devoted admirer of Jeffrey. One of his letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions of Jeffrey, at whose home he had just been staying ; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed hero-worship ; no details of the Scotch critic's appearance or habits or opinions are too slight to be sent to the Macaulay household in London. " He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father's to Mr. Wilberforce's." ... " The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The expression is everything ; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance." ..." The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible." ... " His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety." ... " He is a shrewd observer ; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company." ^ These are only a few of Macaulay's details and admiring comments. Nor did Macaulay outgrow this intense admiration. In April, 1843, he writes Macvey Napier that he has read and reread Jeffrey's old articles till he knows them by heart ; - and in December, 1843, on the appearance of Jeffrey's collected essays, he expresses

1 Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. 3. ~ Ibid., chap. 9.

INTRODUCTION. IX

himself in almost unmeasured terms : " The variety and versatility of Jeffrey's mind seems to me more extraordinary than ever. ... I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any three men, could have produced such diversified excellence. . . . Take him all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of our time." ^

Macaulay's opinion, however, may not be wholly beyond suspicion. He himself had much of Jeffrey's dryness and positiveness of nature, and was temperamentally limited in much the same ways ; he was, moreover, like Jeffrey an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type ; and for all these reasons he may be thought to have been prejudiced. But in Carlyle we have a witness who was never for a moment in sympathy with Jeffrey's neat little formulas in art and in politics, and who has never been accused of registering unduly charitable opinions of even his best friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, " It is certain there has no Critic appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him ; — and his influence, for good and for evil, in Literature and otherwise, has been very great." . . . "His Edinburgh Review [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle, and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of what is called the 'Intelligent Public'; and himself regarded universally as a man of consummate penetration, and the facile princeps in the department he had chosen to cultivate and practise." ^

These quotations may stand in place of countless minor ones that might be marshalled ; they will serve to make real to readers of to-day the magnitude of Jeffrey's power in literary matters during the first quarter of the century.

1 Life and Letters, chap. 9.

X INTRODUCTION.

Horner's nickname for Jeffrey, " King Jamfray," ^ was not a misnomer.

What, then, were the causes of Jeffrey's prestige and popularity? To find a satisfactory explanation, it will be necessary to look beyond Jeffrey's personality, beyond even the band of brilliant workers with whom he was associated, and of whose cleverness and knowledge he made such well-advised use. It will be necessary to take into account the nature of the new venture in literature by means of which Jeffrey won his reputation, the Edinburgh Review^ and to consider carefully its organization, its relation to earlier Reviews, its principles in politics and on social questions, its grounds of appeal to the public, and even such prosaic matters as its business arrangements. But before taking up these broader questions it will be well to examine briefly Jeffrey's individual characteristics as a literary critic.

The point on which Macaulay laid greatest stress in his praise of Jeffrey's work was its versatility ; and to-day as in 1843 this versatility is noteworthy, even after standards of acquirement and performance have had a half century in which to develop. Jeffrey ranges with the same unfaltering step over the most diverse fields of knowledge. He seems equally sure of himself in dealing with politics, history, fiction, poetry, and philosophy. That his air of bravado and of unquestionable mastery was something of a trick, we now know very well. But even with our latter-day knowledge of the tricks of the reviewer's trade, we cannot help admiring and being impressed with the masterful air with which

1 Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner, II, 140.

INTR on UC TION. XI

Jeffrey at one moment sketches the history of EngUsh poetry, at another analyzes the questions at issue between materiahsts and ideaUsts in philosophy, now argues against the doctrine of perfectibility, and now discusses points of constitutional law and of government. A little careful study of Jeffrey's work will usually show that he has had nothing startlingly novel to say on any of these questions. And yet our admiration for the critic's cleverness of manipulation survives even a series of such disenchanting analyses. If these analyses fail to show much reserve power or originality, they make perfectly clear the skill of treatment, the thorough command of essential facts, the readiness of illustration, the keenness of vision within a certain range, and the ease of presentation, which are characteristic of Jeffrey's best work. Admirers of his versatility, then, will not claim for him great originality or vast erudition, or that kind of transforming insight that gives familiar facts an unsuspected significance by bringing them into relation with a new set of first principles. But they will insist on their right to delight in his readiness of adaptation, in his quick-eyed perception, in his tact in simplifying complex problems, and in his unfailing certainty of aim and sureness of motion. He always bears himself gracefully and confidently and threads his way with the perfection of sure-footing to the goal he has from the first foreseen ; and he does all this with equal precision and clairvoyance whether he is dealing with Scott's Marmion^ or the Memoirs of Dr. Priestley^ or Dugald Stewart's Philosophical Essays, or the French translation of Jeremy Bentham's Works. Jeffrey's mastery of his subject is like the successful barrister's knowledge of his brief ; he is sure to know whatever he needs to know in order to carry the matter in hand triumphantly through.

Xll INTR OD UC TION.

Indeed his readiness and his plausibility are not the only points in which Jeffrey the critic suggests Jeffrey the advocate. He has the defects as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. He is always making points ; he is always demonstrating. The intellectual interest preponderates in his critical work, and his discussions often seem, particularly to a reader of modern impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, searchingly analytical, repellingly abstract and systematic. He is always on the watch ; he never lends himself confidingly to his author and takes passively and gratefully the mood and the images his author suggests. He never loiters or dreams. He is full of business and bustle and perpetually distracts you with his sense of what is coming next. He might well have been in Wordsworth's mind when the poet wrote of those who think that

" Nothing of itself must come But we must still be seeking."

Of course, however, it must be borne in mind that this tone and manner, so objectionable to some, and nowadays perhaps not wholly winning in the eyes of any, are common to Jeffrey with all dogmatic critics ; and unquestionably it is as a dogmatic critic that Jeffrey must be classed. By the theory of criticism that had been in vogue during the eighteenth century, there were certain laws of composition and principles of taste which must needs be observed, if the literary artist were to attain any degree of excellence. These laws and principles had been partially set down in various treatises, and in this form were within the ken of the critic and ready for his use as he might need to appeal to them in praising or blaming the productions of would-be authors. But even where these laws had not been codified, they existed, so

INTR on UC TION. xill

ran the ingenious and comforting theory, implicitly in the mind of the critic. In short, the dogmatic critic regarded himself and was generally regarded as able to apply absolute tests of merit to all literary work, and as the final authority on all doubtful matters of taste.

Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition in criticism, and naturally adopted at times its prophetic tone and its pontifical manner toward public and authors. Yet, following his temperamental fondness for compromises, for middle parties and mediating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally to defend this old doctrine or represented himself as an absolute law-giver in literature. Nowhere does he lay down a complete set of principles, like the rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Rapin for the drama, by which excellence in any form of literature may be absolutely tested. Such a high-and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not suggest itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste as in politics, and desires in both spheres the supremacy of a chosen aristocracy. In his essay on Scott's Lady of the Lake he declares the standard of literary excellence to reside in "the taste of a few . . . persons, eminently qualified, by natural sensibility, and long experience and reflection, to perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as to settle the relative value and importance of all the different sorts of beauty." ^ Jeffrey regards himself as one of the choicest spirits of this chosen aristocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best current opinion that he speaks on all questions of taste. His business, then, is to dogmatize, to pronounce this right and that wrong, to praise this author and blame that one ; but his dogmatism is not the dogmatism of reason, but the dogmatism of taste ; he justifies his decisions, not by

XIV . INTRODUCTION.

referring to a code of written laws from which there is no appeal, but by a more or less direct suggestion that he has all the best instructed opinion behind him.

For the most part, therefore, in his condemnation of an author, he makes no use of scientific terms of disapproval and he appeals to no abstract principles ; he simply expresses his personal discontent with the author in commonplace terms of dissatisfaction. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, for example, is ''sheer nonsense," "ludicrously unnatural," full of "pure childishness or mere folly," "vulgar and obscure," full of "absurdities and affectations." These terms are, for the most part, mere circumlocutions for Jeffrey's dislike, mere roundabout ways of saying that the book is not to his taste. As for any attempt to come to an understanding with author or reader about the ends of prose fiction or the best methods of reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks of such a thing. He simply takes up various passages and declares he does not comprehend them, or does not fancy the subjects they treat of, or does not like the author's ideas or methods. He gives no reasons for his likes or dislikes, but is content to express them emphatically and picturesquely. This is, of course, dog matism pure and simple, and a dogmatism, too, mor irritating than the dogmatism that argues, for it seems more arbitrary and more challenging. It is of this tone and method that Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of his Biographia Literaria, when, in commenting on current critical literature, he protests against " the substitution of assertion for argument" and against "the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts."

But irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning dogmatism, it is nevertheless plainly a step forward from

INTR on UC TION. XV

the view that makes the critic absolute law-giver in art. As the Whig position in politics is midway between absolute Monarchy and Democracy, so what we may term the Whig compromise in criticism stands midway between the tyranny of earlier critics and our modern freedom. The mere recognition of the fact that the critic speaks with authority only as representing a coterie^ only as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a change for the better. The critic no longer regards himself as by divine right lord alike of public and authors ; he no longer measures literary success solely by his own little cut and dried formulas of excellence ; he admits more or less explicitly that the taste of living readers, not rules drawn from the works of dead writers, must decide what in literature is good or bad. He still, to be sure, limits arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards as a valid test ; but it is plain that a new principle has implicitly been accepted, and that the way is opened for the development and recognition of all kinds of beauty and power the public may require.

Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have suspected the conclusions that might legitimately be drawn from the ideas that he was helping to make current. He seems never to have had a qualm of doubt touching his right to dogmatize on the merits and defects of art as violently as a critic of the older school. In theory, he held that all artistic excellence is relative ; but in practice, he never let this doctrine mitigate the severity of his judgments. He asserts in his review of Alison on Taste that " what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful, is beautiful to him " ; ^ and that so far as the individual is concerned all pleasure in art is equally real and justifiable. Yet this doctrine seems never to have paralyzed in the

XVI INTRODUCTION.

least his faith in the superior worth of his own kind of pleasure ; and he rates Wordsworth and Coleridge just as indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, as if he had some abstract standard of poetic excellence, which he could prove they fell short of.

When we try to define Jeffrey's taste and to determine just what he liked and disliked in literature, we find an odd combination of sympathies and antipathies. Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken of him as in politics an eighteenth-century survival ; ^ and this seems at first a tempting formula to apply to his taste in literature. But a little consideration will show the impropriety of any such use of terms. The typical eighteenth-century man of letters is a pseudo-classicist; and beyond the pseudo-classical point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as certainly as he had never reached the Romantic point of view. Of Pope, for example, he says : he is " much the best, we think, of the classical Continental school ; but he is not to be compared with the masters — nor with the pupils — of that Old English one from which there had been so lamentable an apostasy." ^ Addison he condemns for his " extreme caution, timidity, and flatness," ^ and he declares that "the narrowness of his range in poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want either of passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe that he was born under the same sun with Shakespeare." ^ These opinions are proof patent of Jeffrey's contempt for pseudo-classicism. Then, too, Jeffrey is, as he himself boasts, almost superstitious in his reverence for Shakspere.^ More significant still is his admiration for other Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, and Webster. " Of the old English dramatists," he

1 Hours in a Library, III, 176. ^ Selections, p. 10.

INTRODUCTION. XVll

assures us in his essay on Ford., ''it may be said, in general, that they are more poetical, and more original in their diction, than the dramatists of any other age or country. Their scenes abound more in varied images, and gratuitous excursions of fancy. Their illustrations, and figures of speech, are more borrowed from rural life, and from the simple occupations or universal feelings of mankind. They are not confined to a certain range of dignified expressions, nor restricted to a particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it is not lawful to look for embellishments." ^ Finally, he even commends Coleridge's great favorite, Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically as Coleridge himself could do : " There is in any one of the prose folios of Jeremy Taylor," he asserts, " more fine fancy and original imagery — more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions — more new figures, and new applications of old figures — more, in short, of the body and the soul of poetry, than in all the odes and the epics that have since been produced in Europe." ^

All these judgments tally exactly with the faith of Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth ; and as one after another they fall under his eye, the reader is led to fancy that he has to do with a devotee of Romanticism, with a critic who is thoroughly in sympathy with the new spirit in literature. But soon, judgments of an altogether different nature force themselves on his notice. The long series of essays is encountered that discusses Crabbe's poetry ; and the reader sees at once how far Jeffrey is from welcoming heartily the new age in poetry or even from allowing its prophets to prophesy in peace and obscurity. Throughout his praise of Crabbe Jeffrey is by implication condemning Wordsworth ; nor does he confine himself to this indirect method of attacking Roman-

xviii INTRODUCTION.

ticism. In the very first essay on Crabbe he turns aside from his subject to ridicule, " the Wordsworths, and the Southeys, and Coleridges and all that ambitious fraternity," and contrasts at great length Crabbe's sanity with Wordsworth's mysticism. " Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they are ; "^ whereas " Mr. Wordsworth and his associates . . . introduce us to beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest observers of nature ; and excite an interest for them — where they do excite any interest — more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation." ^ With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he is on solid ground, dealing with a man who sees life clearly and sensibly, as he himself sees it ; and in his enthusiastic praise of the minute fidelity of Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth and realism, and of his freedom from all meretricious effects, from affectation and from absurd mysticism, we have at once the measure of Jeffrey's poetic sensibility and the sure evidence of his inability to sympathize genuinely with "the Lakers."

Of course, for the classic passages expressing his impatience of the new movement, we must go to the essays on Wordsworth's Exciirsio7i and White Doe. Jeffrey's objections to the Lakers fall under four heads: First, the new poets are nonsensically mystical ; secondly, they falsify life by showing it through a distorting medium of personal emotion, i.e. they are misleadingly subjective; thirdly, they are guilty of grotesque bad taste in their realism ; fourthly, they are pedantically earnest and serious in their treatment of art, and inexcusably pretentious in their proclamation of a new gospel of life.

INTR OD UC TION. xix

To consider these points in detail would lead to a discussion of Wordsworth and Coleridge rather than to a discussion of Jeffrey. Still, Jeffrey's position toward the Lakers is very characteristic of the man, and illustrates admirably both his limitations and his positive qualities ; moreover, his treatment of the Lakers has become a tradition in the history of criticism and deserves for that reason some discussion. A little closer examination, then, of the grounds of Jeffrey's objection to the new movement in literature will not be out of place.

When Jeffrey praises, as he often does, the poetry of the Elizabethan age, delights in its passion, celebrates its imaginative beauty, its figurative richness, its fervor and wayward splendor, the reader seems to be listening to a genuine disciple of the new school of poetry ; and he cannot but expect Jeffrey to show the same hearty appreciation for Coleridge and Wordsworth as for the writings of their chosen models. Jeffrey's rejection, however, of the new school begins at the very point where for their admirers their superiority to the older school begins to show itself, — viz., the moment they commence to interpret life in terms of the infinite. The intenser spiritual consciousness of Wordsworth, his constant and unchanging recognition of the relation of every-day life to the unseen world, are for Wordsworth's admirers characteristic sources of power which place him above the Elizabethan dramatists as an imaginative interpreter of life. For Jeffrey they are the precise qualities which lead to Wordsworth's worst absurdities and most appallingly nonsensical rhapsodies. After quoting some typical passages where Wordsworth gives free utterance to his idealism, Jeffrey exclaims : — " This is a fair sample of that rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehension, and fills the despairing reader

XX INTR on UC TION.

with painful giddiness and terror." ^ This is a perfectly sincere expression of genuine suffering on Jeffrey's part. We cannot doubt that his whole mental life was perturbed by such poems of Wordsworth as the great Ode^ and that it was an act of self-preservation on his part to burst into indignant ridicule and violent protest. To find a man of Wordsworth's age and literary experience deliberately penning such bewildering stanzas and expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for the moment Jeffrey's faith in his own little, well-ordered universe, and then, as he recovered from his earthquake, escaped from its vapors, and felt secure once more in the clear every-day light of common sense, led him into fierce invective against the cause of his momentary panic.

Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Wordsworth's subjectivity than of his mysticism. Why cannot Wordsworth feel about life as other people feel about it, as any well-bred, cultivated man of the world feels about it? When such a man sees a poor old peasant gathering leeches in a pool, he pulls out his purse, gives him a shilling, and walks on, speculating about the state of the poor law ; Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts into a strange fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and " mighty poets in their misery dead," and then in some mysterious fashion converts the peasant's stolidity into a defence against these gloomy thoughts. This way of treating the peasant seems to Jeffrey utterly unjustifiable, in the first place because of its grotesque mysticism, and in the second place because it thrusts a personal motif discourteously into the face of the public and falsifies ludicrously the peasant's character and life. Wordsworth has no right, Jeffrey insists, to treat the peasant merely as the symbol of hii own peculiar mood. Here, as in

INTRODUCTION. Xxi

his protest against Wordsworth's mysticism, Jeffrey pleads for common sense and the commonplace ; he is the type of what Lamb calls "the Caledonian intellect," which rejects scornfully ideas that cannot be adequately expressed in good plain terms, and grasped "by twelve men on a jury."

Crabbe's superiority to the Lakers lies for Jeffrey chiefly in the fact that he has no idiosyncrasies though he has many mannerisms ; he expresses no new theories and no peculiar emotions in his portrayal of common life. Hence his choice of vulgar subjects is endurable — even highly commendable. His peasants are the well-known peasants of every-day England, with whose hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to sympathize — from a distance. But a realism that, like Wordsworth's, professes to find in these poor peasants the deepest spiritual insight and the purest springs of moral life is simply for Jeffrey grotesque in its maladroitness and its confusion of values. Sydney Smith used to say, " If I am doomed to be a slave at all, I would rather be the slave of a king than a cobbler." And this same prejudice against any topsy-turvy reassignment of values was largely responsible for Jeffrey's dislike of Wordsworth's peasants and of his treatment of common life. If peasants keep their places, as Crabbe's peasants do, they may perfectly well be brought into the precincts of poetry ; but to exalt them into types of moral virtue and into heavenly messengers of divine truth, is to "make tyrants of cobblers." Jacobinism in art as in politics is to Jeffrey detestable.

In fact, all the pretensions of the new school to illustrate by its art a new gospel of life were intensely disagreeable to Jeffrey. Just so long as Romanticism showed itself purely decorative, as in Scott or Keats, xxii INTR OD UC TION.

Jeffrey could tolerate it or even delight in it. But the moment it begins, whether in Byron or Wordsworth, to take itself seriously and to struggle to express new moral and spiritual ideals, Jeffrey protests. Just here lies the key to what some critics have found rather a perplexing problem, — the reasons for the precise degree of Jeffrey's sympathy with Romanticism. Keats's luxuriant pictures of Greek life in Endymion^ Jeffrey finds irresistible in " the intoxication of their sweetness " and in the " enchantments which they so lavishly present." ^ Let the poet remain a mere master of the revels, or a mere magician calling up by his incantations in verse a gorgeous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for the delectation of idle readers, and Jeffrey will admire his fertility of invention, his wealth of imagination, his "rich lights of fancy " and "his flowers of poetry." For these reasons Moore and Campbell seem to Jeffrey the most admirable of the Romanticists, and their works the very best of the somewhat extravagant modern school. Writing in 1829, he arranges recent poets in the following order according to the probable duration of their fame : — " The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber : — and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, — and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, — and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our view. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance and dimness . . . and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride. . . . The two who have the longest withstood this rapid withering of the laurel . . . are Rogers and Campbell ; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate