vindication of the human element as invariably necessary to poetry, against his opinion of Shelley, and of Keats, and of the English poetry of his greatest contemporaries generally, as “all Claudian,” and against the implied estimate of Claudian himself. This would be a confusion like his own, a parallel _ignoratio elenchi_, a _fallacia a fallacioribus_. Suffice it to say, that to take him seriously as a critic is impossible.[541] [Sidenote: _Others: Isaac Disraeli._] Of the work which—sometimes of the inner citizenship of the critical Rome and at the worst of its “utmost last provincial band”—was done by a great number of individuals and in no small number of periodicals, dictionaries, and what not, we cannot speak here as fully as would be pleasant,—the historian must become a “reasoned cataloguer” merely, and that by selection. Two contemporary and characteristic figures are those of Isaac Disraeli and of Sir Egerton Brydges. Both had the defects of the antiquarian quality. Rogers, though unamiable, was probably not unjust when, in acknowledging the likelihood of Isaac Disraeli’s collections enduring, he described him as “a man with half an intellect.” In formation and expression of opinion, Lord Beaconsfield’s father too often wandered from the silly to the self-evident and back again, like Addison between his two bottles at the ends of the Holland House gallery: and his numerous _collectanea_ would certainly be more useful if they were more accurate. But the _Curiosities_, the _Amenities_, the _Quarrels_, and all the rest show an ardent love for literature itself, and a singularly wide knowledge of it: they are well calculated to inoculate readers, especially young readers, with both. [Sidenote: _Sir Egerton Brydges._] Brydges’s work, less popular, is of a higher quality. His extensive editing labours were beyond price at his date; in books like the _Censura Literaria_ much knowledge is still readily accessible, which can only be picked up elsewhere by enormous excursions of reading at large; and his original critical power was much higher than is generally allowed. Such enthusiastic admiration of Shelley as is displayed in the notes to his Geneva reprint of the English part of Phillips' _Theatrum Poetarum_ in 1824,[542] is not often shown by a man of sixty-two for a style of poetry entirely different from that to which he has been accustomed. And it shows, not merely how true a training the study of older literature is for the appreciation of newer, but that there must have been something to train. [Sidenote: The Retrospective Review.]