If praise and blame
are to be perfected, not in the mouth of Moliere's maid only but in
that of mischievous, precocious babes and sucklings, you will arrive
at singular judgments by degrees." [Footnote: Carlyle, _Reminiscences_
n 63, 64 ]
Carlyle has much here to say of Jeffrey's "recklessness", his defiance
of all rules, his appeal to the chance taste of the man in the crowd.
He has much also to say of his acuteness, and the unrivalled authority
of his decrees. [Footnote: "Jeffrey was by no means the supreme in
criticism or in anything else, but it is certain there has no critic
appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him and his
influence for good and for evil in literature and otherwise has been
very great. Nothing in my time has so forwarded all this--the 'gradual
uprise and rule in all things of roaring, million headed &c Demos'--
"as Jeffrey and his once famous _Edinburgh Review_'--Ib ] But he is
discreetly silent on their severity and short-sightedness. [Footnote:
"You know", Byron wrote in 1808 "the system of the Edinburgh gentlemen
is universal attack.
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