_The Doctor_ also must have its special animadversion, for this strangely neglected and most delightful book is full of critical matter. Its showers of mottoes—star-showers from the central glowing mass of Southey’s enormous and never “dead” reading—amount almost in themselves to a critical education for any mind which is fortunate enough to be exposed to them when young, while the saturation of the whole book with literature can hardly fail to produce the same effect. It is lamentable, astonishing, and (the word is not too strong) rather disgraceful that, except the “Three Bears” story, the appendix on the Cats, and perhaps the beautiful early passages on the Doctor’s birthplace and family, the book should be practically unknown. But it by no means owes its whole critical value to these borrowed and reset jewels. The passages of original criticism—direct or slightly “applied”—which it contains are numerous and important. The early accounts of the elder Daniel’s library[440] and of Textor’s dialogues[441] are valuable; the passage on “Taste and Pantagruelism”[442] much more so. On Sermons,[443] on Drayton,[444] on the Principles of Criticism,[445] on the famous verse-tournament of the Poitiers Flea,[446] on the Reasons for Anonymity,[447] on Mason[448] (for whom Southey manages to say a good word), on Bowdlerising and Modernising, and (by an easy transition) Spenser[449]—the reader will find nuggets, and sometimes whole pockets, of critical gold, the last-mentioned being one of the richest of all. It is to Southey’s immortal honour (an honour not sufficiently paid him by some Blakites) that he recognised and quoted at length[450] the magnificent “Mad Song,” which is perhaps Blake’s most sustained and unbroken piece of pure poetry. His discussion on Styles[451] is of great value: while the long account[452] of the plays of Langeveldt (Macropedius), and of our kindred English Morality _Everyman_, shows how admirably his more than once projected Literary Histories would have been executed. [Sidenote: _Altogether somewhat_ impar sibi.]