public but personal to himself.

In the writing of the Characters he had found a partial drug for
despair. But his enemies, as soon as might be, took hold of the
anodyne. Like the Bourbons, they had learnt nothing and forgotten
nothing.

The Quarterly Review moved--for a quarterly--with something like
agility. A second edition of the book had been prepared, and was
selling briskly, when this Review launched one of its diatribes
against the work and its author.

Taylor and Hessey [the booksellers] told him subsequently that they
had sold nearly two editions in about three months, but after the
Quarterly review of them came out they never sold another copy. 'My
book,' he said, 'sold well--the first edition had gone off in six
weeks--till that review came out. I had just prepared a second
edition--such was called for--but then the Quarterly told the public
that I was a fool and a dunce, and more, that I was an evil disposed
person: and the public, supposing Gifford to know best, confessed
that it had been a great ass to be pleased where it ought not to be,
and the sale completely stopped.

The review, when examined, is seen to be a smart essay in detraction
with its arguments ad invidiam very deftly inserted. But as a piece
of criticism it misses even such points as might fairly have been
made against the book; as, for example, that it harps too
monotonously upon the tense string of enthusiasm. Hazlitt could not
have applied to this work the motto--'For I am nothing if not
critical'--which he chose for his View of the English Stage in 1818;