Moreover, in two most important divisions of the critic’s art Scott has very few superiors. These are the appreciation of particular passages, books, and authors, and the writing of those critical biographies which Dryden first essayed in English, and of which Johnson is the acknowledged master. The Prefaces to the Ballantyne Novels[526] are the best among Scott’s good things in this kind on the small scale, as the _Dryden_ and the _Swift_ are on the great: for evidences of the former excellence the reader has only to open any one of the half-score volumes referred to above. And those golden qualities of heart which accompanied his genius are illustrated, as well as that genius itself, in his frequent critical writing on other novelists. The criticism of creators on their fellows is not always pleasant reading, except for those who delight to study the weaknesses of the _verdammte Race_. Scott criticises great and small among the folk of whom he is the king, from the commonest romancer up to Jane Austen, with equal generosity, acuteness, and technical mastery. Nor ought we, in this necessarily inadequate sketch, to omit putting in his cap the feather so often to be refused to critics—the feather of catholicity. Macaulay could not praise the delightful lady, whom both he and Scott did their utmost to celebrate, without throwing out a fling at _Sintram_, as if there were no room for good things of different kinds in the great region of Romance. In Scott’s works you may find,[527] literally side by side, and characterised by equal critical sense, the eulogy of _Persuasion_ and the eulogy of _Frankenstein_.[528] [Sidenote: _Campbell: his_ Lectures on Poetry.] Campbell’s critical work is chiefly concentrated in two places, one of them accessible with some difficulty, the other only too accessible after a fashion. The first is the _Lectures on Poetry_, which, after delivering them at the Royal Institution during the great vogue of such things in 1820, he refashioned later for the _New Monthly Magazine_ when he was its editor, so that they are only to be had by one of the least agreeable of all processes, the rummaging _for a purpose_ in an old periodical. [Sidenote: _His_ Specimens.]