Mr. Ebsworth's championship.

This mistake of Mr. Ebsworth's is the less easy to understand inasmuch
as he has been very careful to clear up the popular confusion of our
poet Thomas Carew, "gentleman of the Privy Chamber to King Charles I.,
and cup-bearer to His Majesty," with another Thomas Gary (also a
poet), son of the Earl of Monmouth and groom of His Majesty's
bed-chamber. But it is one thing to prove that this second Thomas Gary
is the original of the "medallion portrait" commonly supposed to be
Carew's: it is quite another thing to saddle him, merely upon
guess-work, with Carew's reputed indiscretions. Indeed, Mr. Ebsworth
lets his enthusiasm for his author run clean away with his sense of
fairness. He heads his Introductory Memoir with the words of Pallas in
Tennyson's "Œnone"--

"Again she said--'I woo thee not with gifts:
Sequel of guerdon could not alter me
To fairer. Judge thou me by what I am,
So shalt thou find me fairest.'"--

from which I take it that Mr. Ebsworth claims his attitude towards
Carew to be much the same as Thackeray's towards Pendennis. But in
fact he proves himself a thorough-going partisan, and anyone less
enthusiastic may think himself lucky if dismissed by Mr. Ebsworth
with nothing worse than a smile of pity mingled with contempt. Now,
so long as an editor confines this belligerent enthusiasm to the
defence of his author's writings, it is at worst but an amiable
weakness; and every word he says in their praise tends indirectly to