Richard Garnett

“ Burton indeed is by no means dry; his narrative is on the contrary highly entertaining. But this animation is purchased by an entire sacrifice of dignity. His style is always below the subject; there is a total lack of harmony and unity; and the work altogether produces the impression of a series of clever and meritorious magazine articles. Possessing in perfection all the ordinary and indispensable qualities of the historian, he is devoid of all those which exalt historical composition to the sphere of poetry and drama. ”

“ Finlay is a great historian of the type of Polybius, Procopius, and Machiavelli, a man of affairs, who has qualified himself for treating of public transactions by sharing in them, a soldier, a statesman, and an economist. He is not picturesque or eloquent, or a master of the delineation of character, but a singular charm attaches to his pages from the perpetual consciousness of contact with a vigorous intelligence. ”

“ Donaldson was a most brilliant man. ‘He is,’ said Peacock, ‘not merely an accomplished scholar, he has genius, taste, and judgment. He can feel poetry, relish wit and humour, penetrate poetry, appreciate eloquence, and develope the intimate relation which the political, moral, and social condition of every age and country bears to its respective and distinctive literature.’ This encomium refers to Donaldson's purely literary exertions. Judgment too often forsook him in his speculations, and taste in his controversies. ”

“ It is hardly possible to say how excruciatingly bad he is now and then. And yet at his best, in organic rightness, beauty, and, above all, spontaneity, we must go among the very highest poetic names to match him.’ If any man of acknowledged literary standing had thus written in 1843, Ebenezer Jones would probably have been preserved to English literature; but he felt utterly crushed as a poet, not so much by the indifference of the public as by the slighting, or even unkindly, reception of his book by the eminent authors to whom he had offered copies. ”

“ The orator in him was rather made than born, his seeming gift of improvisation was the acquisition of long and careful practice. The construction of his speeches was in the highest degree rhetorical, and they owed much of their effect to his marvellous elocution. They are, however, admirable for powerful diction, manly sense, and abound in fancy, humour, and sarcasm; nor were his innumerable contributions to the press less excellent in their way. No one could better popularise a truth or embody an abstraction. The great aim of his life was to benefit the classes from which he had sprung. ”

“ London is a poisonous swamp; the Thames a vast lake; forests, infested by wild beasts and a malign and dwarfish race, overspread most of the country; the remnants of the ancient people, though practising the virtues of hunters and warriors, yet dwell in ignorance and fear; and amid all this darkness new light dawns by the inspiration of a youth of genius. As ‘Bevis’ idealises the scenes and incidents of Jefferies' infancy, so ‘The Story of my Heart’ (1883) idealises the feelings and yearnings of his youth ”

“ They overflow with merriment from end to end, though the humour is frequently too recondite to be generally appreciated, and their style is perfect. They owe much of their charm to the simple and melodious lyrics with which they are interspersed, a striking contrast to the frigid artificiality of Peacock's more ambitious attempts in poetry. As a critic, he was sensible and sound, but neither possessed nor appreciated the power of his contemporaries, Shelley and Keats, to reanimate classical myths by infusion of the modern spirit. ”

“ She had become a Roman catholic, and 'contemplated writing a book to illustrate, from the lives of Shelley and Byron, the dangers and evils resulting from erroneous opinions on the subject of the relations between the sexes.' She left a favourable impression upon her Florentine acquaintance, who describe her as handsome to the last, kindly in disposition and agreeable in manner, but eccentric and given to romancing. Her errors and misfortunes, indeed, chiefly sprang from her determination to be a heroine of romance at any cost. ”

“ As monkeys draw their pedigree from man.
His tragedy exhibits considerable ability, but rather that of a playwright than of a poet. Mariamne's fate had already been the subject of one of Calderon's greatest plays, of which Fenton probably never heard. His lighter pieces are not deficient in sprightliness, but the humour is far inferior to that of his model Prior. On the whole he must be classed with those to whom poetry has been rather an amusement than an inspiration or an art. ”

“ A sadder tragedy was never enacted, but it was inevitable, and no reproach rests upon any person concerned except Arnold. Washington and André, indeed, deserve equal honour: André for having accepted a terrible risk for his country and borne the consequences of failure with unshrinking courage; and Washington for having performed his duty to his own country at a great sacrifice of his feelings.
André's countrymen made haste to do him honour. The British army went into mourning for him. ”

“ To render due justice to Scottish history would indeed require the epic and dramatic genius of Scott, united with the research of a Burton and the intuition of a Carlyle; and until such a combination arises, Burton may probably remain Scotland's chief historian. As a man, he was loved and valued in proportion as he was truly known. ”

“ Hook was a better man than would be easily discovered from his writings. ‘He was,’ says Lockhart, ‘humane, charitable, generous. There was that about him which made it hard to be often in his society without regarding him with as much of fondness as of admiration.’ His defects were a moral vulgarity, far more offensive than the social vulgarity it ridiculed, and a want of every quality especially characteristic of a high-minded man. ”

“ She appears to equal advantage when depicting her favourite Shakespearean heroines, or the brilliant yet unostentatious society she enjoyed so greatly in Germany—to greater advantage still, perhaps, in the graceful æsthetics and deeply felt moralities of her ‘Commonplace Book,’ or the eloquence of her ‘House of Titian,’ an essay saturated with Venetian feeling. Much of her early writing is feebly rhetorical, but constant intercourse with fine art and fine minds brought her deliverance. The charm of her character is evident from her extraordinary wealth in accomplished friends. ”

“ No man could have been less adapted to Indian society by innate taste or acquired habit. With all his intelligence, Lytton was unable to accommodate himself to conventions, and by sallies natural to a poetic temperament, but which dulness might regard or malevolence represent as fantastic follies, he provoked censure and engendered petty gossip pernicious alike to himself and to the empire committed to his charge. ”

“ The vigour of his mind is abundantly proved by his successful transaction of the uncongenial commercial and financial business of the East India Company; and his novels, their quaint prejudices apart, are almost as remarkable for their good sense as for their wit. But for this penetrating sagacity, constantly brought to bear upon the affairs of life, they would seem mere humorous extravaganzas, being farcical rather than comic, and almost entirely devoid of plot and character. ”

“ As a poet in the more conventional and restricted sense he was graceful, delicate, and tender, but not very powerful. As a humorist he was exuberant and endowed with a perfectly exceptional faculty of playing upon words. As a poet he is no unworthy disciple of Lamb and Hunt; as a humorist he was exuberant and endowed with a perfectly exceptional faculty of playing upon words. As a poet he is no unworthy disciple of Lamb and Hunt; as a humorist he resembles Barham, with less affluence of grotesque invention, but with a pathos to which Barham was a stranger. ”

“ Hook's reckless humour and preternatural faculty of improvisation now had full swing, and his powers were never displayed to so much advantage as in this scurrilous, scandalous, but irresistibly facetious, and for a time exceedingly potent journal. No man with a particle of chivalry could have written as Hook did, but no such man could have been equally effective in exposing a pernicious, though generous, popular delusion. ”

“ His efforts to say fine things too frequently result in extravagance. Occasionally, however, as in the ‘Contention of Death and Love,’ marred as even this is by vicious diction, he kindles for a while into true lyrical ardour, and shows that he has more in him than he can bring out. His plays are not highly effective, yet in them he is always the poet, never the mere playwright. His place in literary history is not unimportant as perhaps the purest example of the new influences which began to operate in English literature after the death of Shelley. ”

“ Adams was endowed with so much dramatic talent as to have meditated adopting the stage as a profession, the bent of her literary genius was rather lyrical than dramatic. ‘Vivia Perpetua,’ but moderately interesting as a play, is couched throughout in a fine strain of impassioned emotion, symbolising, in the guise of Vivia's conversion to christianity, the authoress's own devotion to the high ideals which inspired her life. ”

“ Fresh from the author's lips, the tale comes with more vividness than if it had been compiled from journals; and scenes, characters, and situations are represented with more warmth and distinctness. Bruce's character portraits are masterly; and although the long conversations he records are evidently highly idealised, the essential truth is probably conveyed with as much precision as could have been attained by a verbatim report. Not the least of his gifts is an eminently robust and racy humour. He will always remain the poet, and his work the epic, of African travel. ”

“ It was Greg's especial function to discourage unreasonable expectations from political or even social reforms, to impress his readers with the infinite complexity of modern problems, and in general to caution democracy against the abuse of its power. His apprehensions may sometimes appear visionary, and sometimes exaggerated, but are in general the previsions of a far-seeing man, acute in observing the tendencies of the age, though perhaps too ready to identify tendencies with accomplished facts. ”

“ An enthusiastic lover of the beautiful, he was impressed by literary no less than by natural beauty, and was for the time possessed by an admired style as another might be possessed by an overpowering emotion. ”

“ Christie was a man of great ability and worth, acute and industrious, open and cordial, endowed with expansive sympathies and genial warmth of heart. His great fault was the perfervidum ingenium attributed to his countrymen. In vindicating the freedom of the negroes and the reputations of Shaftesbury and Mill he had three excellent causes to defend; but though he did much for them he injured all more or less by indiscreet over-statement, and in the last instance by an irritability perhaps imputable to failing health. As an editor and historical student he is entitled to high praise. ”

“ Cary's literary fame is almost wholly identified with one work. There will probably always be two schools of Dante translation in England, the blank verse and the terza rima, and until some great genius shall have arisen capable of thoroughly naturalising the latter metre, Johnson's terse remark on the translators of Virgil will continue to be applicable. ‘Pitt,’ he says, ‘is quoted, and Dryden read.’ Cary's standard is lower, and his achievement less remarkable, than that of many of his successors, but he, at least, has made Dante an Englishman, and they have left him half an Italian. ”

“ They included a full narrative of his travels from the beginning; a valuable history of Abyssinia, 'neglecting,' however, according to Murray, 'very interesting traits of character and manners that appear in the original chronicles;' and disquisitions on the history and religion of Egypt, Indian trade, the invention of the alphabet, and other subjects, evincing that the great traveller was not a great scholar or a judicious critic. With all their faults, few books of equal compass are equally entertaining; and few such monuments exist of the energy and enterprise of a single traveller. ”

“ These works are artless and almost formless; the influence of Maxwell is plainly discernible in them, and they are said to have owed something of their inspiration to McGlashan, the shrewd manager of the ‘Dublin University Magazine.’ But Lever's early novels display his best qualities at their best—his animal spirits and rollicking glee, his copious and effective anecdote, his power of vigorous, though by no means subtle, delineation of character within the range of his own experience. ”