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spear is all affected, and that I can know nothing of the poet or his characters. So that the only title to admiration in Shakespear, not only in the Merchant of Venice, but in his other plays, all knowledge of his beauties, or proof of an intimate acquaintance with his genius, is confined to the alteration which Mr. Chalmers has adopted in the termination of the two last syllables of the name of this blackamoor, and his reading Morocco for Morocchius. Admirable grammarian, excellent critic! I do not wonder you think nothing of my Characters of Shakespear's Plays, when I see what it is that really admire and think worth the study in them. No, no, Mr. Gifford, you shall not persuade me by your broken English and 'red-lattice phrases,' that the only thing in Shakespear worth knowing, was the baptismal name of this Prince of Morocco, or that no one can admire the author's plays out of Mr. Chalmers's edition, or find anything to admire even there, except the new nomenclature of the dramatis persona. If this is not your meaning in the passage here quoted, I do not know what it is; if it is not, I have done you great injustice in supposing that it is, for I am sure it cannot mean anything else so foolish and contemptible. You had begun this curious paragraph by saying, that I had run through my set of phrases, and was completely at a stand'; and you bring as a damning proof of this, a repetition of two phrases. Do you believe that I had filled 300 pages with the repetition of two phrases? Go, go, you're a censorious ill man.'

The deliberate hypocrisy of Regan and Gonerill, of which I spoke, I had explained in the sentence before by a periphrasis to mean their hypocritical pretensions to virtue.' If I had no right to use the word hastily in this absolute sense, you had still less to confound the meaning of a whole passage. Edmund is indeed ‘a hypocrite to his father; he is a hypocrite to his brother, and to Regan and Gonerill'; but he is not a hypocrite to himself. This is that consummation of hypocrisy of which I spoke, and of which you ought to know something.

I have commenced my observations on Lear, you say, with ‘an acknowledgment remarkable for its naiveté and its truth'; the import of which remarkable acknowledgment is, that I find myself incompetent to do justice to this tragedy, by any criticism upon it. This you construe into a 'determination on my part to write nonsense'; you seem, Sir, to have sat down with a determination to write something worse than nonsense. As a proof of my having fulfilled the promise, (which I had not made,) you cite these words, 'It is then the best of all Shakespear's plays, for it is the one in which he was most in earnest'; and add significantly, 'Macbeth and

Othello were mere jeux d'esprit, we presume.' You may presume so, but not from what I have said. You only aim at being a wordcatcher, and fail even in that. In like manner, you say, 'If this means that we sympathise so much with the feelings and sentiments of Hamlet, that we identify ourselves with the character, we have to accuse Mr. Hazlitt of strangely misleading us a few pages back. "The moral of Othello comes directly home to the business and bosoms of men; the interest in Hamlet is more remote and reflex." And yet it is we who are Hamlet.'-Yes, because we sympathise with Hamlet, in the way I have explained, and which you ought to have endeavoured at least to understand, as reflecting and moralising on the general distresses of human life, and not as particularly affected by those which come home to himself, as we see in Othello. You accuse me of stringing words together without meaning, and it is you who cannot connect two ideas together.

You call me a poor cankered creature,' a trader in sedition,' 'a wicked sophist,' and yet you would have it believed that I am principally distinguished by an indestructible love of flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds and bright skies, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.' I do not understand how you reconcile such welcome and unwelcome things,' but anything will do to feed your spleen at another's expence, when it is the person and not the thing you dislike. Thus you complain of my style, that it is at times figurative, at times poetical, at times familiar, not always the same flat dull thing that you would have it. You point out the omission of a line in a quotation from a well-known passage in Shakespear. You do not however think the detection of this omission is a sufficient proof of your sagacity, but you proceed to assign as a motive for it, That I do it to improve the metre,' which is ridiculous. You say I conjure up objections to Shakespear which nobody ever thought of, in order to answer them. The objection to Romeo and Juliet, which I have answered, was made by the late Mr. Curran, as well as the objection to the want of interest and action in Paradise Lost, which I have answered in another place. -Thus he endeavours to convince one class of critics, that the poet's genius was not confined to the production of stage effect by supernatural means. In another place he expresses his astonishment that Shakespear should be considered as a gloomy writer, who painted nothing but gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire.' One of these classes of critics which, you say, 'are phantoms of my own creating,' comprehends the whole French nation, and the other the

1 Quoted from the Edinburgh Review, No. 56.

greatest part of the English with Dr. Johnson at their bead, who in his Preface, one of the most perfect pieces of criticism since the days of Quintilian (and which might have been written in the days of Quintilian just as well as in ours) has neglected to expatiate on Shakespear's indestructible love of fowers and occurs, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers. You know nothing of Shakespear, nor of what is thought about him: you mind cely the text of the commentators. With respect to Mr. Wordsworth's Ode, which I have dragged into my account of Romeo and Juliet, I did not quarrel with the poetical conceit, but with the metaphysical doctrine founded upon it by his school. There is a difference between ends of verse and sayings of philosophers. If Shakespear had been a great German transcendental philosopher (either at the first or second hand) his talking of the music of the spheres might have rendered him suspected. You compare my account of Hamlet to the dashing style of a showman: I think the showman's speech is proper to a show, and mine to Hamlet. You, Sir, have no sympathy in common with Hamlet; nothing to make him seem ever present to your mind's eye'; no feeling to produce such an hallucination in your mind, nor to make you tolerate it in others. You are an Ultra-Crepidarian critic.

You laugh at my theory, that Filch's picking of pockets has ceased to be so good a jest as formerly,' from the degeneracy of the age, that is, from the diminution of the practice, as at variance with the Police Report. Shortly after I had hazarded this piece of conjectural criticism, the Beggar's Opera was hooted off the stage in America-because they have no Police Report there. I may have been premature in applying this conclusion from a highly advanced state of civilization, or from the degeneracy of the age we live in, to our own country.

What you say of my remarks on the use which Shakespear makes of the principal analogy in Cymbeline, and of contrast in Macbeth is beneath an answer. You should confine yourself to mere matters of verbal criticism. Thus you object to my use of the term 'logical diagrams' as unprecedented and barbarous: yet we talk of syllogising in mode and figure, and besides, the word has been made pretty malleable by Mr. Burke. What do you say to his talking of the geometricians and chemists of France, bringing the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions worse than indifferent to common feelings and habitudes." Would you call this slip-slop absurdity'? But to talk of the dry bones of diagrams, and escape with impunity from the censure of small critics, a man must assert that the king of this country holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the people.'

I am obliged to you for informing me of the real name of the person who wrote the ingenious parallel between Richard the Third and Macbeth.

The article in the last Review on my Lectures on English Poetry, requires a very short notice. You would gladly retract what you have said, but you dare not. You are a coward to public opinion and to your own. You begin by observing, Mr. Hazlitt seems to have bound himself like Hannibal to wage everlasting war, not indeed against Rome, but against accurate reasoning, just observation, and precise, or even intelligible language.' This might be true, if the opinion of the Quarterly Review were synonymous with accurate reasoning, just observation, and knowledge of language. We have traced him in his two former predatory excursions on taste and common sense. Had he written on any other subject, we should scarcely have thought of watching his movements.'

You were

principally excited to notice' the Round Table by some political heresies which had crept into it: you 'condescended to notice' the Characters of Shakespear's Plays, 'to shew how small a portion of talent and literature was necessary to carry on the trade of sedition.' You have been tempted to watch my movements in the present work to shew how little talent and literature is necessary to write a popular work on poetry. 'But though his book is dull, his theme is pleasing, and interests in spite of the author. As we read, we forget Mr. Hazlitt, to think of those concerning whom he writes.' Do you think, Sir, that a higher compliment could come from you?

It would neither be for my credit nor your own, that I should follow you in detail through your abortive attempts to deny me exactly those qualifications which you feel conscious that I possess, or afraid that others will ascribe to me. You are already bankrupt of your word, nor can I be admitted as an evidence in my own case. You say that I am utterly without originality, without a power of illustration, or language to make myself understood !-I shall leave it to the public to judge between us. There is one objection however which you make to me which is singular enough: viz. that I quote Shakespear. I can only answer, that I would not change that vice for your best virtue.' If a trifling thing is to be told, he will not mention it in common language: he must give it, if possible, in words which the Bard of Avon has somewhere used. Were the beauty of the applications conspicuous, we might forget or at least forgive, the deformity produced by the constant stitching in of these patches'-[i.e. by the beauty of the applications]. Unfortunately, however, the phrases thus obtruded upon us seem to be selected, not on account of any intrinsic beauty, but merely because they are fantastic and unlike

what would atterally occur to an ordinary writer. Certainly, Sir, your style is very diferent from Shakespear's. I observe in your notes to the Baviad and Mevind, you diversify your matter by frequently quoting Greek.-Now it appears to me that these quotations of your's add to the wit only by varying the type. If these learned patches plagued the Cruscas and Lauras,' my quotations have given other people the horrors"!

You quote my definition of poetry, and say that it is not a definition of anything, because it is completely unintelligible. To prove this, you take one word which occurs in it, and is no way important, the word sympathy, which you tell us has two significations, one anatomical, and the other moral; and poetry, according to you, has no skill in surgery or ethics.' I do not think this shews a want of clearness in my definition, but a want of good faith or understanding in you.

You say that I get at a number of extravagant conclusions by means sufficiently simple and common. He employs the term poetry in three distinct meanings, and his legerdemain consists in substituting one of these for the other. Sometimes it is the general appellation of a certain class of compositions, as when he says that poetry is graver than history. Secondly, it denotes the talent by which these compositions are produced; and it is in this sense that he calls poetry that fine particle within us, which produces in our being rarefaction, expansion, elevation and purification.' [This is Mr. Gifford's academic style, not mine.] Thirdly, it denotes the subjects of which these compositions treat. It is in this meaning that he uses the term, when he says that all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it; that fear is poetry, that hope is poetry, that love is poetry; and in the very same sense he might assert that fear is sculpture and painting and music; that the crimes of Verres are the eloquence of Cicero, and the poetry of Milton the criticism of Mr. Hazlitt.' It is true I have used the word poetry in the three senses above imputed to me, and I have done so, because the word has these three distinct meanings in the English language, that is, it signifies the composition produced, the state of mind or faculty producing it, and, in certain cases, the subject-matter proper to call forth that state of mind. Your objection amounts to this, that in reasoning on a difficult question I write common English, and this is the whole secret of my extravagance and obscurity.-Do you mean that the distinguishing between the compositions of poetry, the talent for poetry, or the subject-matter of poetry, would have told us what poetry is? This is what you would say, or you have no meaning at all. I have expressly treated the subject according to this very division, and I have endeavoured to define that common some