1832.] [ 511 ] 



THE TWO PROFESSORS A GLANCE AT THE QUARTERLY AND 



BLACKWOOD. 



WE believe Miss Fanny Kemble to be a young lady of a certain delicacy 

 of mind and sensibility of feeling; and we know very well that upon 

 such minds the operation of pernicious praise, like that which it has been 

 deemed most expedient in particular quarters to lavish upon " Francis the 

 First," is likely to prove doubly and directly fatal. Take a solemn cox- 

 comb who has just wreaked his wretched poetry upon the public j take 

 him, we say, if you please slap him on the shoulder familiarly pat him 

 patronizingly on that globular excrescence which he fondly conceives to 

 be a head, or take him by the button in confidence, and communicate to 

 his private ear your belief that he is a second Milton or an improved 

 Shakspeare ; so shall you cause such extremity of folly to be enacted by 

 the dunce, as must needs furnish eternal laughter to the side-shakers -, but, 

 for the muses' sake, forbear to mislead a clever and amiable girl into the 

 notion that she has all but effected that, of which her whole life may be 

 vainly spent in the accomplishment j and that she has already done some- 

 thing, which we sincerely hope she may, after much labour and study, be 

 enabled to perform. 



We must here be permitted to take one or two retrospective glances, 

 suggested by the extraordinarily, exact, and concurrent manner in which 

 certain critics have jumped upon this occasion. When such people do 

 agree, their unanimity is not wonderful j and we shall attempt to show, 

 that the only real cause of surprise is, that the mystery has not been seen 

 through long ago. We are not sorry, therefore, to take up Miss Kemble's 

 Tragedy now, because it supplies us with a sling with which we shall be 

 enabled to " kill two birds with one stone ; " or, at all events, to launch 

 our pebble at a brace of poetical and panegyrical professors with as much 

 directness and vigour as we can employ. It is not a crow we have to 

 pick with these gentlemen ; that were, indeed, an insufficient type to 

 represent the enormous bird which we purpose to disfledge between us 

 a bird that has too long drank the life-blood of our literature, and gorged 

 itself to satiety upon the mangled flesh of its victims. 



To be plain j we have been urged to this work by a conviction that the 

 present state of criticism, so far as poetry is concerned, is such as impera- 

 tively calls for an exposure of the system whereby it is upheld ; and demands 

 from us, not a mere disclaimer of participation, not a merely qualified 

 reprehension, but an honest and fearless denunciation of it. We say then, 

 without further ceremony, that the two works to wnich we shall at this 

 time more particularly apply ourselves the Quarterly Review and Black- 

 wood's Magazine have, at least of late years, for purposes best known 

 to themselves, but also pretty well known to others, studiously abstained 

 from the criticism of any one poetical work possessing real merit -, that 

 they have held up to praise and admiration works which all the world, 

 except themselves and their minor crew of associates, saw and felt upon 

 the instant to be the most helpless trash ; and that they have (to speak 

 tenderly and within compass) preferred to consult their own convenience 

 and advantage, rather than to fulfil the understood pledges given to the 

 public, upon the faith of which alone, they exist, or deserve to exist. 



Let us take a short glance at the Quarterly Review. Every one is by 

 this time pretty well acquainted with the character of that publication 



