LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 257 



explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of 

 our literature of the Tudor and Jacobean periods) might well be 

 called the Golden Dustman, so many were the precious trifles 

 sifted out by his intelligent industry. It would not be easy to 

 name any work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. 

 He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no man had 

 such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so exactly the mean 

 ing with which words were used during the period he did so 

 much to illustrate. Elegant scholarship is not often, as in him, 

 patient of drudgery and conscientious in painstaking. Between 

 such a man and Mr. Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means 

 agreeable. The one was not more distinguished by modest 

 accuracy than the other is by the rash conceit of that half- 

 knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor than down 

 right ignorance. This language is strong because it is true, 

 though we should not have felt called upon to use it but for the 

 vulgar flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt alludes depreciatingly 

 to the labours of his predecessors to such men as Ritson, 

 Utterson, Wright, and Sir Frederick Madden, his superiors in 

 everything that goes to the making of a good editor. Most of 

 them are now dead and nailed in their chests, and it is not for 

 us to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others like them, 

 who first opened paths for us through the tangled wilderness of 

 our early literature. A modern editor, with his ready-made helps 

 of glossary, annotation, and comment, should think rather of the 

 difficulties than the defects of these pioneers. 



How different is Mr. Hazlitt s spirit from that of the thorough 

 and therefore modest scholar ! In the Preface to his Altenglische 

 Sprachproben, Matzner says of an editor, das Beste was er ist 

 verdankt er Andern, an accidental pentameter that might seem 

 to have dropped out of Nathan der Weise. Mr. Hazlitt would 

 profit much by getting some friend to translate for him the 

 whole paragraph in which it occurs. 



We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superintend a new 

 edition of Warton s History of English Poetry, and are pained 

 to think of the treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is 

 likely to receive at the hand of an editor without taste, discrimi 

 nation, or learning. Of his taste a single specimen may suffice. 

 He tells us that * in an artistic and constructive point of view, 

 the Mylner of Abington is superior to its predecessor, that pre 

 decessor being Chaucer s Reve s Tale, which, with his usual 

 inaccuracy, he assigns to the Miller ! Of his discrimination we 

 have a sufficient test in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick 



