imagine.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically
puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kempshott,"
"campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps
to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to
guard the bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.

[2] _Glen Desseray and other Poems_. By John Campbell Shairp,
London, 1888. P. 218.

[3] This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is
neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only
indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following
sins of English criticism between 1840-1860,--the slow and reluctant
acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal
to give Browning, even after _Bells and Pomegranates_, a fair
hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin
among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of
erratic genius like _Lavengro_; the ignoring of work of such
combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_. For a sort of
quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford
(himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's
_Life_ of the latter, i. 387.

[4] This "undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it.