great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no
inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much
abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the
tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that
of De Quincey to incessant divergences of "rigmarole," being
formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen
--not novelists--of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay,
were indeed both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in the
one case, the "shadow of Frederick" in the other, had cut short their
critical careers: and presumptuous as the statement may seem, it may
be questioned whether either had been a great critic--in criticism
pure and simple--of literature.

What is almost more important is that the _average_ literary
criticism of William IV.'s reign and of the first twenty years of her
present Majesty's was exceedingly bad. At one side, of course, the
work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by
profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict. At
the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had
admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories
and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some
cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great
revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite
so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely
larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its
general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a
favourite pen on the _Times_, and enjoying (I do not know with
how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray's
_Thunder and Small Beer_ has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement
nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very