Hazlitt is less polished, but more suggestive, and in closer touch with life than Landor. In seizing the important qualities of an author's works and summarizing them in brief space, Hazlitt shows the skill of a trained journalist. His three volumes, _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays_ (1817), _Lectures on the English Poets_ (1818), and _Lectures on the English Comic Writers_ (1819) contain criticism that remains stimulating and suggestive. He loves to arrive somewhere, to settle his points definitely. His discussion of the frequently debated question,--whether Pope is a poet, shows this characteristic:-- "The question,--whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have been a great prose writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort." His two volumes of essays, _The Round Table_ (1817) and _Table Talk_ (1821-1822), caused him to be called a "lesser Dr. Samuel Johnson." While the combative dispositions of Landor and Hazlitt did not make them ideal critics of their contemporaries, the taste of the age liked criticism of the slashing type. The newly established periodicals and reviews, such as _The Edinburgh Review_ (started in 1802), furnished a new market for critical essays. Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), editor of _The Edinburgh Review_, accused Wordsworth of "silliness" in his _Lyrical Ballads_; and said vehemently of a later volume of the same poet's verse: "This will never do." _The Quarterly Review_ in 1818 spoke of the "insanity" of the poetry of Keats. In 1819 _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ gave a fatherly warning to Shelley that Keats as a poet was "worthy of sheer and instant contempt," advised him to select better companions than "Johnny Keats," and promised that compliance with this advice would secure him "abundance of better praise." Even the more genial Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), the friend of Shelley and Keats, and the writer of many pleasant essays, called Carlyle's style "a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance." We like Hunt best when he is writing in the vein of the _Spectator_ or as a "miniature Lamb." In such papers as _An Earth upon Heaven_, Hunt tells us that in heaven "there can be no clergymen if there are no official duties for them"; that we shall there enjoy the choicest books, for "Shakespeare and Spenser should write us _new ones_." He closes this entertaining paper with the novel assurance: "If we choose, now and then we shall even have inconveniences." WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800 [Illustration: WILLIAM COWPER. _From the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence_.]