prevented him from pursuing what he would have disdainfully regarded as a second-hand business. We may—we must—regret that he never finished that _History of English Poetry_ which he hardly began, that he never attempted the half-dozen other things of the kind, which he was better equipped for doing than any man then living, and than all but three or four men who have lived since. But the regret must be tempered by a secret consciousness that on the whole he probably would _not_ have done them, let time and chance and circumstance have favoured him never so lavishly. [Sidenote: _Peculiarity of his critical position._] Yet this very idiosyncrasy of limitation and hamper in him made, in a sense, for criticism; inasmuch as there are two kinds of critical temperament, neither of which could be spared. There is the eager, strenuous, almost headlong critical disposition of a Dryden, which races like a conflagration[102] over all the field it can cover; and there is the hesitating, ephectic, intermittent temperament of a Gray, which directs an intense and all-dissolving, but ill-maintained heat at this and that special part of the subject. In what is called, and sometimes is, “originality,” this latter temperament is perhaps the more fertile of the two, and Gray has it in an almost astounding measure. Great as was his own reading, a man might, I think, be as well read as himself without discovering any real indebtedness of his, except to a certain general influence of literary study in many times and tongues. He knew indeed, directly or indirectly, most of the other agents in the quiet and gradual revolution which was coming on English poetic and literary taste; but he was much in advance of all of them in time. Well as he was read in Italian, he nowhere, I think, cites Gravina, in whom there was something to put him on new tracks; and though he was at least equally well read in French, and does cite Fontenelle, it is not for any of the critical germs which we have discovered in that elusive oracle. The one modern language to which he seems to have paid little or no attention was German,[103] where the half-blind strugglings of the Zürich school might have had some stimulus for him. Whatever he did, alone he did it; and though the volume of his strictly critical observations (not directed to mere common tutorial scholarship) would, if printed consecutively, perhaps not fill twenty—certainly not fifty—pages of this book, its virtue, intrinsic and suggestive, surpasses that of libraries full of Rapins and even of Batteux. [Sidenote: _The Letters._]