to glorify a fierce and magnificent misanthropy ' Byron was guilty of more than an error in taste. His dissatisfaction came to a head on the publication of Don Juan. He knew the power of the poem, and he was not the man to assail it with 'priest-like cant'. His quarrel with it was that it excited good feelings only to accustom us to their speedy and complete extinction, that it held ennobling pursuits and disinterested virtues to be mere deceits or illusions-in a word, that instead of tearing the shams from life, it scoffed at life. All its brilliance could not keep Jeffrey from thinking that what was likely to defeat the chance of happiness was essentially unhealthy. Happiness was Jeffrey's own great quest, and he believed it was to be found by making the best of circumstances that were, on the whole, tolerably pleasant. He skimmed along the surface of life doing a vast amount of work of one kind or another, and finding pleasure all the way, and from the vantage-ground of success he showed much personal kindness, but perhaps too little sympathy with disquietude of thought. He annoyed Carlyle by advising him not to be 'so dreadfully in earnest'. And Carlyle found this consolation in his journal:

'The great business of man he, intellectually, considers, as a worldling does, to be happy. I have heard him say, "If folly were the happiest I would be a fool." Yet his daily life belies this doctrine and says, "Though goodness were the most wretched I would be good." In conversation he is brilliant, or rather sparkling,

lively, kind, willing either to speak or listen, and above all men I have ever seen ready and copious, on the whole exceedingly pleasant in light talk-yet alas! light, light, too light. He will talk of nothing earnestly, though his look sometimes betrays an earnest feeling.' There is some irritation here, yet there is truth in the portrait.

Jeffrey's last word in criticism of Byron was a comparison with Scott in which he developed the idea that the greatest authors reconcile us to life by showing the good in it, and so are moral teachers who help to make us happier and better'. How opposite to Byron's, he says, 'is the system, or the temper, of the great author of Waverley-the only living individual to whom Lord Byron must submit to be ranked as inferior in genius-and still more deplorably inferior in all that makes genius either amiable in itself, or useful to society !... With the one we seem to share a gay and gorgeous banquet-with the other, a wild and dangerous intoxication.' Jeffrey was never in any doubt that the Waverley Novels were the greatest work of the age, and though he did not hesitate to point out minor blemishes, some of which are now the stock-in-trade of Scott's detractors, no critic gave them a more sincere and delighted welcome. But the point in Jeffrey's criticism of Scott that is best known now is that the review of Marmion was, on the whole, unfavourable; and those who draw their knowledge of it-and of Scott's and Mrs. Scott's reception of itfrom Lockhart, generally forget that a few pages

further on Lockhart describes Jeffrey's review of the Lady of the Lake as the best specimen of contemporary criticism on Scott's poetry. Jeffrey did not reprint the review of Marmion, but the review of the Lay of the Last Minstrel-which is the earliest, and not the best, of the pieces given in this volume-shows clearly enough the nature of his difficulties. He was troubled by Scott's antiquarianism.) He accepted the Lay as a romance composed by a modern minstrel, or such a romance as might have been written were that kind of poem still in vogue, but he felt that the attempt to revive the past had not been carried out consistently. The details of Border history, for which he suspected that few readers would share Scott's partiality, seemed to him not to be properly adjusted to the rest of the poem, and interfered with his appreciation of those passages of general interest in which the author speaks for himself or in the person of the minstrel. And the public's choice of quotations has supported Jeffrey's opinion, since the verses with which everybody is familiar are those which he praised. He preferred the Lady of the Lake to either of the earlier poems, if only for this reason, that he did not discover in it the same affectation of the antique. But he thought that Scott did not show himself as a giant till he wrote the Waverley Novels. In them he had subordinated his interest in the facts of history to his love of the enduring qualities of human nature.)

Jeffrey was a convinced modern. He was interested

in the past only in so far as he saw its bearings on the present. Yet because he found fault with much in the literature of his time, or declared his preference for an older to a newer method, he has sometimes been regarded as a belated exponent of eighteenthcentury taste. It is true that he chose as his early masters Addison and Johnson. It is true also that he admired the diction and versification of the Vanity of Human Wishes and the Deserted Village. But he gave it as his plain opinion that the writers who adorned the beginning of the eighteenth century had been eclipsed by his contemporaries, and in the very last literary article that he wrote during his editorship of the Review he even said that the age he lived in had a hundred times more poetry, and more true taste for poetry, than that which immediately preceded it. His very belief in the literary impulses of his time made him look with misgivings on some of their expressions. A good Whig might be a severe critic of Whig measures, and Jeffrey could find faults in a great literary movement without losing his faith in it. He mistrusted Scott's antiquarianism, and Wordsworth's mysticism, and Byron's misanthropy, and Southey's rhetorical diffuseness. In some cases time has been on his side. He was a modern in his sympathies, and yet he might without any inconsistency admire Crabbe for his pictures of the images and affections that belong to our universal nature', or declare in praise of Campbell that the most powerful and enchanting poetry is

that which depends for its effect upon the just representation of common feelings and common situations'.

His library showed that he had no interest in the past in itself. It was a very poor collection, made up largely of law books and review copies. There were few volumes of earlier date than the eighteenth century, and if there was a single rarity Jeffrey probably did not know, and as probably would not have cared. One of the clearest impressions left on Carlyle's mind, on paying his first call, was the tattery, ill-bound, or unbound condition of the books. Cockburn remarks on his 'slatternly habits', and tells us that he despised binding, and did not value good printing. The inventory and valuation shows an unusual proportion of odd volumes and broken sets. His cellar, which contained well over three hundred dozens, and was already in repute when Lockhart wrote Peter's Letters, was distributed by the auctioneer; but his library was divided quietly among his friends. He had no interest in a book as a book. He did not care whose copy he read, and so long as the copy was readable he was satisfied. A book was to him only something to stimulate his mind and keep it working.

He was an intellectualist. This is the real explanation of his criticism. In private life he would give full play to sentiment. He confessed to a romantic temper, and we know from several sources-from Froude's Life of Carlyle and Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, as well as from his own letters-that