350 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



edge 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 labors 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 w^e 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 ^xjrachproben, Matzner says of an 

 editor, das Beste was er ist verdankt er Andern, an acci- 

 dental 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 para- 

 graph in which it occurs. 



We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superin- 

 tend 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 hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or 

 learning. Of his taste a single specimen may sufiice. 

 He tells us that " in an artistic and constructive point 

 of view, the Mylner of Ah in gt on is superior to its prede- 

 cessor," that predecessor 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 in a late 



