[2] I remember (when 'I was but a little tiny boy') I thought that
'the fringed curtains of thine eye advance,' addressed by Prospero
to Miranda, must needs be a very fine line; imagine then my
confusion, on referring for corroboration to my 'guide,
philosopher, and friend,' as he truly was, to find this passage:
'Why Shakespeare should have condescended to the elaborate
nothingness, not to say nonsense, of this metaphor (for what is
meant by "advancing curtains"?) I cannot conceive. That is to say,
if he did condescend: for it looks very like the interpolation of
some pompous declamatory player. Pope has put it into his
_Treatise on the Bathos_.'

It is curious that Leigh Hunt, whose style has been so severely handled
(and, it must be owned, not without some justice) for its affectations,
should have been so genuine (although always generous) in his
criticisms. It was nothing to him whether an author was old or new; nor
did he shrink from any literary comparison between two writers when he
thought it appropriate (and he was generally right), notwithstanding all
the age and authority that might be at the back of one of them.
Thackeray, by the way, a very different writer and thinker, had this
same outspoken honesty in the expression of his literary taste. In
speaking of the hero of Cooper's five good novels--Leather-Stocking,
Hawkeye, etc.--he remarks with quite a noble simplicity: 'I think he is
better than any of Scott's lot.'

It is a 'far cry' from the 'Faery Queen' to 'Childe Harold,' which,
reckoning by years, is still a modern poem; yet I wonder how many
persons under thirty--even of those who term it 'magnificent'--have ever
read 'Childe Harold.' At one time it was only people under thirty who
_had_ read it; for poetry to the ordinary reader is the poetry that was