Originally published in Pearson's Weekly (C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.) vol.1 #22 (20 Dec 1890).
Critics' often go very astray in their estimates. For instance, "She Stoops to Conquer" was dismissed by one of them as an incoherent piece of stuff, devoid of either plot or incident, unnatural in every scene, and outraging the laws both of the drama and of human nature. The same reviewer showed his discrimination by describing Sheridan's "Rivals" as heterogeneous mass of matter through which he assures his readers that he had waded with the utmost difficulty.
Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review, made several sad blunders, especially as regards Wordsworth's poems. This graceful writer's "Imitations of Mortality" is regarded by most people as the best piece of work he ever did, but Jeffrey could speak of it only as "a flagrant specimen of the hopelessly absurd." "The White Doe of Rylstone" he considered to be "the very worst poem ever imprinted in a quarto velume," an opinion which is condemned by its own sweeping injustice.
"This will never do," were the words with which he began his critique upon Wordsworth's "Excursion," going on to describe this m as "longer, weaker, and tamer than any of Mr. Wordsworth's previous 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. We have imitations of Cowper and even of Milton here, ingrafted on the natural drawl of the Lakers, and diluted into harmony by that profuse and irresistible wordiness which deluges all the blank verse of this school of poetry, and lubricates and weakens all the structure of their style."
Jeffrey was as unfortunate when he alluded to Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" as "so much trash," bewailing the national taste which in it "can admire sheer nonsense." The Quarterly Review's epithets of "savage and tartarly" were well earned for it by Gifford, who was perhaps more unjust in his criticisms than any writer of equal standing. His strictures were not confined to the work which he was reviewing, but included its author, and no friend of any of the authors whom he disliked could hope for fair treatment from him.
Hunt's association with the Liberal Examiner were sufficient to secure for him the most savagely-hostile criticism from the Tory editor, who followed up some adverse remarks upon one of his works with this passage:—
"Mr. Hunt is, indeed, a most pitiable man. He began life, we doubt not, with pure and lofty dreams; he must now feel that he has taken the wrong course, and that he can never realise them; he has put on himself his own trammels. He knows that he has done so; they gall him, but he can never break them. Henceforth all will be wormwood and bitterness to him. He may write a few more stinging, and a few more brilliant, periods; he may slander a few more eminent characters; he may go on to deride venerable and holy institutions; he may stir up more discontent and sedition, but he will have no peace of mind within; he will do none of the good he once hoped to do, nor yet have the bitter satisfaction of doing all the evil he now desires; he will live and die unhonoured in his own generation, and for his own sake, it is to be-hoped, moulder unknown in those which are to follow."
Shelley was another writer who seems to have roused Gifford’s special ire. He condemned his poetry as "drivelling prose run mad," without "one original image of nature, one single expression of human feeling, or new association of the moral with those of the material world." As in the case of Leigh Hunt, the author comes in for chastisement at the hands of this bitter critic, in common with his work, and we are informed that Shelley was "unteachable in boyhood, unamiable in youth, querulous and unmanly in manhood."
Gifford’s stoned unjust review of "Endymion," which is falsely said to have been the cause of Keats' death, is too well known to call for more than a passing allusion. It is sufficient to say that the attack was not softened by the smallest particle of praise. Jeffrey, though rebuking Keats almost as severely for his obscurity, wanderings, and extravagance, did not wholly condemn his poems, admitting that they were "flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in the labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present."
To turn for a moment to the converse side, we read that Denham's "Cooper's Hill" "is a poem, which, for majesty of the style, is, and ever will be, the exact standard of good writing." We venture to say that not one in a hundred of the readers of this article know of its existence, any more than they do of that of Tickell's "Elegy on the Death of Addison," pronounced "one of the finest poems in our language," or of Blackmore's "Creation," which was called one of the most noble productions of English verse in which the depths of philosophy are enlivened with all the charms of poetry." On the appearance of "Pamela," the world was informed that "next to the Bible, it ought to be preserved." Preserved it no doubt is, in old and scarce editions, but not to be read.