We cannot “stint his sizings” to that extent. Yet it is also impossible to give him much space, more particularly because his interest has shrunk to, and is very unlikely ever greatly to swell from, that of a kind of representative position. Jeffrey is no mere English La Harpe, as some think: he does not exemplify the Neo-classical “Thorough,” the rigour of the Rule, after the fashion which makes that remarkable person so interesting. On the contrary, he is only the last and most noteworthy instance of that mainly Neo-classic inconsistency which we pointed out and on which we dwelt in the last volume. Except that he looks more backward than forward, Jeffrey often reminds us rather of Marmontel. He has inherited to the fullest extent the by this time ingrained English belief that canons of criticism which exclude or depreciate Shakespeare and Milton “will never do,” as he might have said himself: but he has not merely inherited, he has expanded and supplemented it. He has not the least objection to the new school of students and praisers of those other Elizabethan writers, compared with whom Shakespeare would have seemed to La Harpe almost a regular dramatist, and quite a sane and orderly person. He has a strong admiration for Ford. He will follow a safe fellow-Whig like Campbell in admiring such an extremely anti-“classical” thing as Chamberlayne’s _Pharonnida_. He uses about Dryden and Pope language not very different from Mr Arnold’s, and he is quite enthusiastic (though of course with some funny metrical qualms) about Cowper. [Sidenote: _His inconsistency._] But here (except in reference to a man like Keats, who had been ill-treated by the Tories) he draws the line. There may have been something political in the attitude which the _Edinburgh_ assumed towards the great new school of poetry which arose between 1798 and 1820. But politics cannot have had everything to do with the matter, and it cannot be an accident that Crabbe is about the only contemporary poet of mark, except Byron, Campbell, and Rogers, whom Jeffrey cordially praises. Above all, the reasons of his depreciation of poets so different as Scott and Wordsworth, and the things of theirs that he specially blames, are fatal. There is plenty to be said against Scott as a poet, and plenty to be said against Wordsworth. _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ is far from faultlessly perfect: but the beauty of its subject, its adaptation of antique matter and manner, and its new versification, are almost beyond praise from the poetical point of view. It is exactly these three things that Jeffrey most blames. There are scores and hundreds of things in Wordsworth which are helplessly exposed to the critical arrows: but a man who pronounces the _Daffodils_ “stuff” puts himself down once for all, irrevocably, without hope of pardon or of atonement, a person insensible to poetry as such, though there may be kinds and forms of poetry which, from this or that cause, he is able to appreciate.[553]