[Sidenote: _His criticism on Madame de Staël._] Once more, as in Leigh Hunt’s case (though on the still smaller scale desirable), we can take a “brick of the house” with advantage and without absurdity. Indeed I hardly know anywhere a single Essay which exhibits a considerable critic so representatively as is done for Jeffrey by his article on Madame de Staël’s _De La Littérature_, which appeared in the _Edinburgh_ for November 1812 and stands after the Tractate on Beauty in the forefront of his Collected Works.[554] He was in the full maturity of his critical powers; as a woman (for Jeffrey was quite a chivalrous person), and as a kind of foreign and female Whig, his author was sure of favourable treatment; the “philosophic” atmosphere of the book appealed to his education, nationality, and personal sympathies; and he had practically most of the knowledge required.[555] And the article is a very good article,—polite in its mild exposure of Madame de Staël’s hasty generalisations, extremely clever and capable in its own survey of literature—Jeffrey was particularly good at these surveys and naturally inclined to them—sensible, competent, in the highest degree readable. It would not be easy, unless we took something of Southey’s on the other side, better to illustrate the immense advance made by periodical criticism since the _Edinburgh_ itself had shown the way. Yet there are curious drawbacks and limitations which explain why Jeffrey has not kept, and why he is perhaps not very likely to recover, his pride of place. Part of his idiosyncrasy was a very odd kind of pessimism, which one would rather have expected from a High Tory than from a “blue and yellow,” however symbolical these colours may be of fear. To Jeffrey—in the second decade of the new flourishing of English poetry, which had at least eighty good years to run; in the very year of the new birth of the novel; with Goethe still alive and Heine a boy in Germany; with the best men of the great French mid-nineteenth century already born—it seems that “the age of original genius is over.” Now, when a man has once made up his mind to this, he is not likely to be very tolerant of attempts on the age’s part to convince him that he is wrong. But even his judgments of the past exhibit a curious want of catholicity. The French vein, which is so strong in him, as well as the general eighteenth-century spirit, which is so much stronger, appears in a distinct tendency to set Latin above Greek. He commends the Greeks indeed for their wonderful “rationality and moderation in imaginative work,” suggesting, with a mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, that the reason of this is the absence of any models. Having no originals, they did not try to be better than these. His criticism of the two literatures is taken from a very odd angle—or rather from a maze and web of odd angles. “The fate of the Tarquins,” he says, “could never have