Now the result of dwelling upon the works of that Pindar who was born not in Bœotia but in Devonshire, and on the ever-beloved and delightful _Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_, if not also on its prose, would no doubt be far more agreeable to the reader than much of what he actually finds here: and to dwell on them would fall in with some of the writer’s oldest and most cherished tastes. Nay, even the _Baviad_ and _Mæviad_, out of proportion and keeping as is much of their satire, and the _Pursuits of Literature_ itself,—despite its tedious ostentation of learning, its endless irrelevance of political and other note-divagation, and its disgusting donnishness without the dignity of the better don,—give, especially in the three first cases, much marrowy matter in the texts, and an abundance of the most exquisite unintentional fooling in the passages cited by the copious notes. Unfortunately so to dwell would be itself out of keeping and proportion here. The things[551] are among the lightest and best examples of the critical _soufflé_, well cheesed and peppered. Or (if the severer muses and their worshippers disdain a metaphor from Cookery, that Cinderella of the Fine Arts) let us say that they exemplify most agreeably the substitution of a sort of critical _banderilla_, sometimes fatal enough in its way, for the Thor’s hammer of Dryden and the stiletto of Pope. But they are only symptoms—we have seen things of their kind before, from Aristophanes downwards—and we must merely signal and register them as we pass in this adventure, keeping and recommending them nevertheless for quiet and frequent reading _delectationis causa_. The infallibility and vitality of the _Anti-Jacobin_, in particular, for this purpose, is something really prodigious. The _Rovers_ and the _New Morality_ and the _Loves of the Triangles_ seem to lose none of their virtue during a whole lifetime of the reader, and after a century of their own existence. [Sidenote: _The influence of the new_ Reviews, &c.]