That catholicity which has been said to be his main critical virtue will be found (without any of the vice which has been hinted as sometimes accompanying it) in the very list of the authors selected from—Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Dekker, and Webster, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats: while the less “imaginative” poets are by no means neglected, and in particular Leigh Hunt brings out, often as no one had ever done before, that sheer poetical quality of Dryden to which the critics of 1800-1830 had been as a rule unjust. But the comment (and one cannot say more) is usually worthy of the selection. The fullest division of all is that on Spenser— indeed Leigh Hunt’s appreciation of this at once exquisite and magnificent poet is one of the very best we have, and would be the best of all if it had been a little more sensitive to Spenser’s “brave_st_ translunary things,” to the pervading exaltation and sublimation of thought and feeling which purifies the most luscious details, and unites the most straggling divagations in a higher unity. But, short of this, it would be difficult to have a better detailed eulogium, _pièces en main_, of the subject; nor does Hunt fail to make out something of a case against, at least, the exaggeration of Lessing’s attack on the _ut pictura poesis_ view. But his limitations appear in his complete misunderstanding of Coleridge’s exact and profound observation that Spenser’s descriptions are “not in the true sense of the word _picturesque_, but composed of a wondrous series of images as in dreams.” What Coleridge meant, of course, is that sequence rather than strict “composition” is Spenser’s secret—that his pageants _dissolve into_ one another. But in these finesses Hunt is seldom at his ease. So, again, he blasphemes one of the most beautiful lines of _The Tempest_— “The fringed curtains of thine eye advance”— as “elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense” [how nothingness can in any case be sense he shall tell us], “pompous,” “declamatory,” and disapproved of by—Pope!