LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 337 



only to disappoint. These unhappy verses of Lovelace's 

 had been dead and lapt in congenial lead these two hun- 

 dred years ; — what harm had they done Mr. Hazlitt that 

 he should disinfer them 1 There, is no such disenchant- 

 er of peaceable reputations as one of these resurrection- 

 men of literature, who will not let mediocrities rest in 

 the grave, where the kind sexton, Oblivion, had buried 

 them, but dig them up to make a profit on their lead. 



Of all Mr. Smith's editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt 

 is the worst. He is -at times positively incredible, 

 worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is sajnng a 

 good deal. Worthless as Lovelace's poems were, they 

 should have been edited correctly, if edited at all. Even 

 dulness and dirtiness have a right to fair play, and to 

 be dull and dirty in their own way. Mr. Hazlitt has 

 allowed all the misprints of the original (or by far the 

 gi'eater part of them) to stand, but he has ventured on 

 many emendations of the text, and in every important 

 instance has blundered, and that, too, even w^here the 

 habitual practice of his author in the use of words might 

 have led him right. The misapprehension shown in some 

 of his notes is beyond the belief of any not fixmiliar 

 with the way in which old books are edited in Eng- 

 land by the job. We have brought a heavy indictment, 

 and we proceed to our proof, choosing only cases where 

 there can be no dispute. We should premise that Mr. 

 Hazlitt professes to have corrected the punctuation, 



" And though he sees it full of wounds, 

 Gruel one, still he wounds it. (p. 34.) 



Here the original reads, " Cruel still on," and the only 

 correction needed was a comma after " cruel." 



" And by the glorious light 

 Of both those stars, which of their spheres bereft, 

 Only the jelly 's left." (p. 41.) 



The original has " of which," and rightly, for " their 

 15 Y . 



