MR. GIFFORD.

MR. GIFFORD was originally bred to some handicraft: he afterwards contrived to learn Latin, and was for some time an usher in a school, till he became a tutor in a nobleman's family. The lowbred, self-taught man, the pedant, and the dependant on the great contribute to form the Editor of the Quarterly Review. He is admirably qualified for this situation, which he has held for some years, by a happy combination of defects, natural and acquired; and in the event of his death, it will be difficult to provide him a suitable successor.

Mr. Gifford has no pretensions to be thought a man of genius, of taste, or even of general knowledge. He merely understands the mechanical and instrumental part of learning. He is a critic of the last age, when the different editions of an author, or the lates of his several performances were all that occupied the inquiries of a profound scholar, and the spirit of the writer or the beauties of his style were left to shift for themselves, or exercise the fancy of the light and superficial reader. In studying an old author, he has no notion of any thing beyond adjusting a point, proposing a different reading, or correcting, by the collation of various copies, an error of the press. In appreciating a modern one, if it is an enemy, the first thing he thinks of is to charge him with bad grammar-he scans his sentences instead of weighing his sense; or if it is a friend, the highest compliment he conceives it possible to pay him is, that his thoughts and expressions are moulded on some hackneyed model. His standard of ideal perfection is what he himself now is, a person of mediocre literary attainments: his utmost contempt is shown by reducing any one to what he himself once was, a person without the ordinary ad

vantages of education and learning. It is according y with much complacency in his critical pages, that T.n are classical and courtly as a matter of course; as it is jest and evident truism, that Whigs and Reform ers m sons of low birth and breeding-imputations from one he himself has narrowly escaped, and both of which he b suitable abhorrence. He stands over a contemporary pert with all the self-conceit and self-importance of a country » A master, tries it by technical rules, affects not to undereas, meaning, examines the hand-writing, the spelling, skrugs shoulders and chuckles over a slip of the pen, and keeps a stat look-out for a false concord and-a flogging. There is liberal, nothing humane in his style of judging: it is a gest petty, captious, and literal. The Editor's political subwry --adds the last finishing to his ridiculous pedantry and van: has all his life been a follower in the train of wealth an: p strives to back his pretensions on Parnassus by a piace and to gild his reputation as a man of letters by the sm ie ness. He thinks his works are stamped with additorsi having his name in the Red-Book. He looks up to the tions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, gross and over-weening adulation of his early engin notions are low, upstart, servile. He thinks it the highest to a poet to be patronised by a peer or by some dowager of ;-a. " He is prouder of a court-livery than of a laurel-wreath only sure of having established his claims to respectabil "v having sacrificed those of independence. He is a tree to ther Muses; a door-keeper to learning; a lacquey in the state. believes that modern literature should wear the fetters of cias antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the scales of com prejudice; that power is equivalent to right; that ga pendent on rules; that taste and refinement of language cons word-catching. Many persons suppose that Mr Gard news better than he pretends; and that he is shrewd, art al, and signing But perhaps it may be nearer the mark to sup his dulness is guarantee for his sincerity, or that be re be tool of the profligacy of others, he is the dupe of his owa diced feelings, and narrow, hood-winked perceptions.

"Destroy his fib or sophistry: in vain—

The creature's at his dirty work again!"

But this is less from choice or perversity, than because he cannot help it and can do nothing else. He damns a beautiful expression less out of spite than because he really does not understand it: any novelty of thought or sentiment gives him a shock from which he cannot recover for some time, and he naturally takes his revenge for the alarm and uneasiness occasioned him, without referring to venal or party motives. He garbles an author's meaning, not so much wilfully, as because it is a pain to him to enlarge his microscopic view to take in the context, when a particular sentence or passage has struck him as quaint and out of the way: he fly-blows an author's style, and picks out detached words and phrases for cynical reprobation, simply because he feels himself at home, or takes a pride and pleasure in this sort of petty warfare. He is techy and impatient of contradiction; sore with wounded pride; angry at obvious faults, more angry at unforeseen beauties. He has the chalk-stones in his understanding, and from being used to long confinement, cannot bear the slightest jostling or irregularity of motion. He may call out with the fellow in the Tempest― "I am not Stephano, but a cramp!" He would go back to the standard of opinions, style, the faded ornaments, and insipid formalities that came into fashion about forty years ago. Flashes of thought, flights of fancy, idiomatic expressions, he sets down among the signs of the times-the extraordinary occurrences of the age we live in. They are marks of a restless and revolutionary spirit: they disturb his composure of mind, and threaten (by implication) the safety of the state. His slow, snail-paced, bed-rid habits of reasoning, cannot keep up with the whirling, eccentric motion, the rapid, perhaps extravagant combinations of modern literature. He has long been stationary himself, and is determined that others shall remain so. The hazarding a paradox is like letting off a pistol close to his ear: he is alarmed and offended. The using an elliptical mode of expression (such as he did not use to find in Guides to the English Tongue) jars him like coming suddenly to a step in a flight of stairs that you were not aware of. He pishes and pshaws at all this, exercises a sort of interjectional criticism on what excites his spleen, his envy, or his wonder, and hurls his

meagre anathemas ex cathedra at all those writers who

ferent alike to his precepts and his example'

Mr. Gifford, in short, is possessed of that sort of learning wa is likely to result from an over-anxious desire to suppry of the first rudiments of education; that sort of wit, w offspring of ill-humour or bodily pain; that sort of se arises from a spirit of contradiction and a disposition to cas dispute the opinions of others; and that sort of reputata a the consequence of bowing to established authority and m influence. He dedicates to some great man, and re testes pliments in return. He appeals to some great name, ani der-graduates of the two Universities look up to him as of wisdom. He throws the weight of his verbal critici discoveries in black-letter reading into the gap, that is to be making in the Constitution by Whigs and Ralias, am he qualifies without mercy as dunces and miscreants, and tles himself to the protection of Church and State ter of his mind is an utter want of independence and mar in all that he attempts. He cannot go alone, he must have a go-cart and trammels, or he is timid, freti ii, and b.......child. He cannot conceive of any thing different from finds it, and hates those who pretend to a greater reach lect or boldness of spirit than himself. He inclines, by a sa and deliberate bias, to the traditional in laws and govern the orthodox in religion; to the safe in opinion, to :: imagination; to the technical in style, to whatever in render of individual judgment into the hands of auth subjection of individual feeling to mechanic rujes 18 one flying in the face of these, or straggling from the twat he thinks he has them at a notable disadvantage, an! them without loss of time, partly to soothe his own Se fied self-consequence, and as an edifying spectacle to ins. friends He takes none but unfair advantages. He versaries (that is, those who are not in the leading school or party) with some personal or accidental de ret writer has been punished for a political litel, he is sure to it in a literary criticism. It a Tidy g-s on cry head a favour at court, she is reminded of at in Mr. Gillonis maat.