Seeing what Mr. Lowell has done for Dante, Rousseau, etc., one does not wish him to be limited in his Subjects: but I do wish he would do for English Writers what Ste. Beuve has done for French. Mr. Lowell so far goes along with him as to give so much of each Writer's Life as may illustrate his Writings; he has more Humour (in which alone I fancy S. B. somewhat wanting), more extensive Reading, I suppose; and a power of metaphorical Illustration which (if I may say so) seems to me to want only a little reserve in its use: as was the case perhaps with Hazlitt. But Mr. Lowell is not biassed by Hazlitt's--(by anybody's, so far as I see)--party or personal prejudices; and altogether seems to me the man most fitted to do this Good Work, where it has not (as with Carlyle's Johnson) been done, for good and all, before. Of course, one only wants the Great Men, in their kind: Chaucer, Pope (Dryden being done {193}), and perhaps some of the 'minora sidera' clustered together, as Hazlitt has done them. Perhaps all this will come forth in some future Series even now gathering in Mr. Lowell's Head. However that may be, this present Series will make me return to some whom I have not lately looked up. Dante's face I have not seen these ten years: only his Back on my Book Shelf. What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before a shop in Regent Street where were two Figures of Dante and Goethe. I (I suppose) said, 'What is there in old Dante's Face that is missing in Goethe's?' And Tennyson (whose Profile then had certainly a remarkable likeness to Dante's) said: 'The Divine.' Then Milton; I don't think I've read him these forty years; the whole Scheme of the Poem, and certain Parts of it, looming as grand as anything in my Memory; but I never could read ten lines together without stumbling at some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the Schoolroom, worse than either. Tennyson again used to say that the two grandest of all Similes were those of the Ships hanging in the Air, and 'the Gunpowder one,' which he used slowly and grimly to enact, in the Days that are no more. He certainly then thought Milton the sublimest of all the Gang; his Diction modelled on Virgil, as perhaps Dante's. Spenser I never could get on with, and (spite of Mr. Lowell's good word) shall still content myself with such delightful Quotations from him as one lights upon here and there: the last from Mr. Lowell.