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tions. He mapped out some of its wonders, traversed 

 its seas, ascended mountains, and with awe and an ever- 

 increasing enthusiasm marvelled on the inexhaustible 

 beauties by which he was surrounded. He lingered long 

 in the enjoyment of its pleasures, and dwelt eloquently 

 on " the deserts vast and antres wild," the " rare noises 

 and pleasant music," the tropic luxuriance, and the un- 

 bounded fertility of this enchanted isle, raised by the 

 hand of the arch enchanter himself. But it is to contrast 

 two distinct lines of criticism ordinarily adopted, and not 

 to dilate on either, that I refer to them. To contrast 

 such criticism as that of Coleridge, Goethe, Schlegel, 

 Charles Knight, and Ulrici, with that of the ordinary 

 routine of nineteenth-century-review-criticism ; to shew 

 how poor, mean, and dei'ogatory to the poet's memory it 

 frequently is ; to point out its injustice, no less than its 

 ignorance ; how, proceeding on false assumptions, it 

 drags the name of the poet in the dirt ; how, pretending 

 to judicial wisdom, it is merely partisan ; how it practices 

 base detraction under cover of exalted dignity, and thus 

 effects slander, malignant, insidious, and dangeroiis — 

 dangerous because insidious. 



This may seem strong, if not unnecessarily severe 

 language ; yet it is hardly more harsh than the case 

 warrants. By a systematic assumxDtion that, because the 

 poet was an actor and a manager of a theatre, he was 

 necessarily not an artist ; and by reasoning from such pre- 

 mises as thoiigh they were proved, no less injury has been 

 done to the cause of literature, than violence offered to the 

 cause of truth. Yet this is still the course : the criticism 

 of to-day differs from that of the daj'S of Malone, Johnson, 

 Warburton, and Steevens, only perhaps in being less cap- 

 tious — in scattering praise more regally, and in pretending 

 to a larger admiration. With more extended knowledge 

 and information, it assumes base and specious motives 



