FIRST GALLERY

OF

LITERARY PORTRAITS.

LORD JEFFREY.

LORD JEFFREY, like many remarkable men of our era, was a striking instance of many-sidedness: critic, lawyer, politician, judge, are some of the phases in which he exhibited his spirit in the course of a long and active existence. As a critic, he stood in "glorious and well-foughten field" side by side with the chivalry of Hazlitt. As a pleader, he was equalled at his native bar by Cockburn alone. As a philosopher, besides the general vein of subtle reflection which pervades all his writings, he, in one beautiful region of metaphysics, excelled the elegant Stewart and the captivating Alison. As a politician, he was a model of uprightness and consistency. And as a judge, he has, it is universally understood, gathered new and verdant laurels.

With the name of Jeffrey, the idea of the "Edinburgh Review" is inseparably connected. For nearly thirty years he was its conductor; and, though backed by a host of varied talent, he might truly be called its life and soul: the spirit of the editor was seen in every article, in every page. Even the bolder, coarser, and more original writers who contributed to it, became insensibly tinctured by the pervading tone-of polite badinage, of refined sarcasm, of airy cleverness-which was the established esprit de corps. To this, the wild sallies of Sidney Smith, the fierce sarcasms and darker passions of Brougham, the eloquent gall of Hazlitt, had all to be subservient; and, smoothed down, they must often have been under the cautious and tasteful influence of the editor, ere they met the public eye. And hence the rapid and boundless popularity of the "Review." It succeeded, because it came forth, quarter after quarter, not a chaos of jarring though

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ingenious speculations, but a regular and brilliant whole; and the principle of fusion was unquestionably the accomplished mind of Jeffrey. During the earlier part of his career, he was the ideal of an editor, not writing the half, or perhaps the tithe of his periodical, but, far better, breathing his own spirit as a refining and uniting principle over the whole.

Lord Jeffrey's character, as a critic, is now very generally agreed on. When he criticised an author whom he thoroughly appreciated, he was a refined, and just, and discriminating judge. He threw his whole spirit into the work; he executed his analysis in a fine and rapid style; he brought out not merely the meaning, but the soul of his author; he threw a number of pleasing, if not profound, lights upon his subject; he expressed the whole in beautiful and buoyant, rich and rapid diction; and there stood a criticism airy as the gossamer, brilliant as the glow-worm, yet solid as the pillared firmament. Witness his reviews of Crabbe, which, by their timely aid, lifted the modest and exquisite, but half-forgotten, writer into his just place, threw a friendly veil over his frequent asperity and coarseness, and were, in short, his salvation as a poet, just as Burke's fatherly interference was his fortune as a man. Who that has read, retains not a vivid and pleasing memory of his reviews of Campbell's "Gertrude," and Campbell's "Specimens of the English Poets," particularly the latter; of his kindly and very eloquent panegyric on Hazlitt's "Characters of Shakspere's Plays;" of his laboured and masterly analysis of Moore's "Lalla Rookh;" of his honest and powerful article on Lord Byron's Tragedies; and high above all these, of perhaps the finest piece of elegant philosophising in the language, the review of Alison's "Taste," afterwards matured and expanded into the article "Beauty," in the "Encyclopædia Britannica." Nor were his doings in the way of quiz and cutting-up at all inferior in their way. We will not soon forget that most witty and wicked running commentary which he kept up for many years on Southey's interminable productions; nor did the laureate till his dying day. We entertain a keen memory of his annihilation of a host of poetasters, from drunken Dermody down to prosing Hayley; his attempted demolition of that clever transgressor Tommy Little, who, however, showed fight; and his incessant persevering, powerful, but unsuccessful attempts to make Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, the laughing-stocks of the world. And this brings us to what would require a volume for its elucidation, the sore subject of the faults, errors, and delinquencies of "The Edinburgh Review." In a word or two on the ungracious subject we must be indulged.

The great error of the early numbers was one incident to, perhaps inseparable from, the age of its principal writers. It lay in an air of levity and dogmatism, added to a sneering, captious,

sceptical spirit, imbibed from intimacy with "Candide" and the "Philosophical Dictionary." It seemed their aim to transplant the "Encyclopædiast" spirit, in all its brilliant wickedness, into the Scottish soil. This appeared at first a hazardous experiment, but it was done so dexterously and so boldly, as, for the time, to be completely successful. Fired by success, its authors dared everything, sneered at every one, attempted to solve the foundations of all things, in a flood of universal ridicule. They themselves, young men though they were, proclaimed themselves enemies to enthusiasm, in all its forms-in politics, in poetry, in religion. Whatever transcended the common standards of feeling and of thought, whatever towered up into the regions of the extravagantly sublime, diverged into the eccentric, struck into the original and the bold, or merged in the infinite, they sought to reduce and abate by the one sovereign receipt of indiscriminate and reckless sneering. The flower of German poetry, then opening its magnificent petals into day, they laughed to scorn, as if it had been a vulgar and gaudy weed, or a useless and noisome fungus. They assailed with bitter ridicule at once republicanism and methodism, careless of the fine spirit involved in, and extractable from both. But especially, from the first, they applied all their energies to the demolition of the Lake Poets, whose revolutionary genius was then threatening to alter the whole tone and spirit, and matter and manner of our literature. Of these attacks upon Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, we have ever entertained one opinion. They were not savage and brutal assaults, like those of "The Quarterly" on Keats and Shelley, but they were, on this very account, the more formidable. Their sole aim, and it was for a while successful, was to make the Lakers, not hateful, but ridiculous; to hold them up as a set of harmless, crazy men, overflowing with vanity and childish verse; not without genius, certainly, but their genius was by no means first-rate, and altogether neutralised by false taste and self-conceit. Such was the prevailing tone and style of those celebrated criticisms; and their effect was, first of all, to intensify, almost to madness, the egotism and the resolution of the parties assailed, to drive their works out of general circulation, to increase the attachment of their devoted adherents, and ultimately to provoke a reaction, the most signal and irreversible of which we have any example in the history of letters. The men whose names were, for twenty years, laughed at in every form of ridicule, and identified with all that was vain, silly, childish, egotistical, and affected, are now looked up to with universal love and reverence, and have been hailed by acclamation as leading stars in the bright host of our literary heaven. Let it be a lesson to succeeding critics for ever; and let us, in looking back upon the prophecies of those reviewers, which have not been fulfilled; their sneers, which have fallen

powerless; their laughter, which has died away; their abuse, which time has robbed of its sting; their criticisms, on which experience has set the seal of worthlessness-blame not so much the men, as the false and bad system on which they acted, and draw the solid and sober inference, that ridicule is no more a test of poetry than it is of truth.

But, to pass from this topic, on which, after all, we have only touched, we would now, in order fully to convey our idea of Lord Jeffrey's criticism, compare it with that of some others of his coadjutors and contemporaries. It wanted the racy originality, the springy strength, the tumultuous overflow of humour, which distinguished the author of "Peter Plymley's Letters;" but, on the other hand, possessed always a subtlety of distinction, and often a splendour of illustration, to which Sidney Smith had no pretensions. The one could no more have written a review of "Styles," than the other the review of Alison. It had not the massive strength of Brougham; but was superior in refinement and fluency, and never fell into his more offensive faults-the overbearing dogmatism, the arrogance, the fierce and truculent spirit, which breathes in more articles than in that on Don Pedro Cevallos. Less comprehensive, less judicial, less learned, than the criticism of Mackintosh, it was more lively, more varied, and animated by a sweeter, purer, and more natural vein of eloquence. It was not so glowing, or so imaginative, as the criticism of Wilson: but more subtle in its thinking, and more sober in its style. It wanted the nerve, the antithesis, the rich literary allusion, the radiant fancy, the magnificent isolated pictures of Macaulay's elaborate writings; but had far less of the air of effort, of artifice, and of mannerism. It was inferior to that of Hazlitt, alike in solidity and in splendour. It had not his fierce sincerity; his intense but sinister acuteness; his discrimination, infallible as an instinct; his easy vigour; but, on the other hand, it was not disfigured by his fits of spleen, his bursts of egotistical passion, his deliberate paradoxes, his sudden breaks, his ungainly apostrophes, his distortions, fantasies, and frenzies the "pimples of red and blue corruption," which now and then bestud his uneasy and uneven, yet brilliant page. As specimens of pure and perfect English, of refined sense, expressed in lucid language, and studded with modest and magnificent ornaments, Jeffrey. produced few compositions equal to those by which Robert Hall irradiated the early pages of "The Eclectic Review." Nor had his criticism the pith and profundity of Foster; nor the chary but precious encomium, the humour, the unearthly stand of laughing superiority to his author, assumed by Thomas Carlyle.. But in versatility and vivacity, and in that happy conversational tone which can only be acquired by constant mingling with the best society, his works stood, and stand alone.