The accessibility of the other place—the critical matter contributed to the well-known _Specimens of the British Poets_, and to some extent the actual selections themselves—is greater because they are in nearly all the second-hand book-shops, where from sixpence to a shilling a volume will buy—well bound often and in perfectly good condition—matter which, at any proper ratio of exchange, is worth a dozen times the money. This worth consists of course mainly in the matter selected: but the taste which selected it must figure for no small increment, and the purely critical framework is, to say the least, remarkably worthy of both. Campbell, a very puzzling person in his poetry, is by no means a very easily comprehensible or appraisable one in his critical attitude. In the general arrangement of this he is distinctly of the older fashion, as the fashions of his time went. Like his style, though this is a very fair specimen of the “last Georgian,” still in a manner the standard and staple of the plainer English prose, his opinions are a thought periwigged and buckrammed. He demurs to the “Romantic Unity” of Hurd earlier and Schlegel later; and when in his swashing blow (and a good swashing blow it is of its kind) on the side of Pope in the weary quarrel, he tries to put treatment of artificial on a poetical level with treatment of natural objects, we must demur pretty steadily ourselves. But, on the other hand, he distinctly champions (and was, I believe, the first actually so to formulate) the principle that “in poetry there are many mansions,” and, what is more, he lives up to it. He really and almost adequately appreciates Chaucer: it is only his prejudice about Unity and the Fable that prevents him from being a thorough-going Spenserian; and when we come to the seventeenth century he is quite surprising. Again, it is true, his _general_ creed makes him declare that the metaphysicians “thought like madmen.” But he is juster to some of them than Hazlitt is; he has the great credit of having (after a note of Southey’s, it is true) re-introduced readers to the mazy but magical charms of _Pharonnida_; and he admits Godolphin and Stanley, Flatman and Ayres. If the history of the earlier part of his Introductory Essay is shaky, it could not have been otherwise in his time; and it shows that the indolence with which he is so often charged did not prevent him from making a very good use of what Warton and Percy, Tyrwhitt and Ritson and Ellis, had provided.