tured to tell the world that any head clerk of a bank could write a better history of Greece than Mr. Grote, if he would have the vanity to waste his time over it; and I have heard a man of fair attainments and of sound scholarship contend that there were twenty living authors who could write plays as fine as Shakespeare's.
Jeffrey's extraordinary blunders are too well known to need repetition, and Christopher North was not without his share of similar mishaps; Walpole cheerfully sentenced Scandinavian poetry in the bulk as the horrors of a Runic savage; Madame de Staël objected to the "commonness" of Miss Austen's novels; Wordsworth thought Voltaire dull, and Southey complained that Lamb's essays lacked "sound religious feeling;" George Borrow, whose literary tastes were at least as erratic as they were pronounced, condemned Sir Walter Scott's Woodstock as "tiresome, trashy, and unprincipled," and ranked Shakespeare, Pope, Addison, and the Welsh bard Huw Morris together as "great poets," apparently without recognizing any marked difference in their respective claims. Then there is Taine, who finds Pendennis and Vanity Fair too full of
