The Press.
London, England, 1857-08-22 00:00:00

fittraturt.

Anoient Poems Ballads and Songs of the
. Peasantry of England. Edited by Robert
Bell. (Annotated Edition of the English
Poets.) London : J. W. Parker and Son.
Tins edition of the English Poets is really a
most important undertaking. It is not a
flimsy and flashy reprint, in unreadable type,
with pillaged notes and pedantic prefaces.
The paper is fit for library shelves; the type
is clear, and strongly set out. The volumes
are edited with scholarly supervision. The
texts are carefully compared, and the notes
are close, strong, and pointed. We find what
we want to know, without being affronted with
a tiresome parade of the editor's erudition, or
teased with index-learning. We have, from
the first, carefully examined this most valuable
republication of our English poets, and we
can conscientiously recommend it to our
readers. In point of price it is the cheapest
issue of our times. Although we differ from
the able editor on some critical questions, we
cheerfully acknowledge the weight which must
attach to his opinion ; and we are confirmed
in our own views on this point by our recol-
lection of the estimate formed of his powers
by one of the soundest critics of our age, now
unhappily no more.
Mr. Robert Bell, the editor of this impor-
tant undertaking, is in many respects one of
the best living representatives of our English
critics. He has had great practical experience
of literary life; and he has united the habits
of a student of the closet with the tastes of a
genial man of the world. Some literary men
are apt to become the dupes of their own
subtlety, but Mr. Bell guards himself against
this tendency by his wholesome sense of
reality ; and in our opinion " reality " is the
_aspiration of pure English literature. There
is a representative power, a vigorous repro-
duction of the true national feelings, in
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and also in Dryden, and
our other standard classics. In Spenser and
Milton, for obvious reasons, the Anglo-Saxon
realism is not so defined. But even in the
secondary poets and prose-writers of the last
century, exactly as they approached to this
verification of English life, so did they succeed
in gaining the attention of the public and the
ears of posterity. Critics aro obliged often to
learn this truth from books, but Mr. Bell has
an intuitive sense of it, and it guides him on
his course as editor of our English poets.
Other qualities, also, support Mr. Bell in
his arduous undertaking. He is no Dryasdust
buried in the lumber of a library. He has a
manly-mind, and he can bring solid, weighty,
good sense to the interpretation and appre-
ciation of critical questions on which opinions
are divided. We confess, for our own part, we like
that critics should not be learned mechanicians,
who " measure genius with a two-foot ule,"
and who " scorn the genius that scorns them."
The example of Ritson—" a literary wild oat
" of the mountains," as he was called by Isaac
Disraeli—was enough as a specimen of that
kind ; but in our own day we have had some
Ritsons of a smaller species, and we do not
think that they have contributed much to the
honour of our critical literature.
Goethe, in "Faust," has expressed (with
some reserve) an opinion that the habit of
criticism hardens the heart and narrows the
mind. There is no necessity for such being
the result of an application to critical pur-
suits. No one would apply the terms
" narrow " or " frigid " to Longinus, or Cicero,
or Quinctilian, or to Erasmus, Bayle, Le
Clerc, or the Schlegels, each and all of whom
were habitually addicted to critical studies.
We purposely avoid reference to great
original thinkers like Aristotle, and modern
moralists from Bacon to Sir William Hamil-
ton. We admit that mere reviewers, like Lord
Jeffrey, and men of his type, become narrow
and blind to originality, or else that they
become extravagantly emotional, and fall into
silly ecstacies about secondary productions.
When we compare the frenzied raptures
with which Lord Jeffrey gloated over the pro-
'luctions of Mr. Dickens with the cold recep-
tion given to the genius of Shelley and