When he speaks of great men recently dead,--of Burke, Pitt, Burns, Goldsmith, and others of his distinguished contemporaries,--he is never-ending in his praise of them. His affectionate admiration for so many went so far, almost, as to frighten him into the belief that it was a weakness: after having said--"I like A----, I like B----. By Mohammed!" he exclaims in his memoranda, "I begin to think I like every body; a disposition not to be encouraged; a sort of social gluttony, that swallows every thing set before it." Not only was it a pleasure to him to praise those who deserved it, but he would not allow the dead to be blamed, nor the illustrious among the living; we all know how much he admired the talents of Madame de Stael: "Il avait pour elle des admirations _obstinees_." "Campbell abused Corinne," he says in his journal, 1813: "I reverence and admire him; but I won't give up my opinion. Why should I? I read her again and again, and there can be no affectation in this. I can not be mistaken (except in taste) in a book I read and lay down and take up again; and no book can be totally bad, which finds some, even _one_ reader, who can say as much sincerely." And elsewhere: "H---- laughed, as he does at every thing German, in which, however, I think he goes a little too far. B----, I hear, contemns it too. But there are fine passages; and, after all, what is a work--any or every work--but a desert with fountains, and, perhaps, a grove or two every day's journey? To be sure, in mademoiselle, what we often mistake and 'pant for' as the 'cooling stream,' turns out to be the 'mirage' (_critice_, verbiage); but we do, at last, get to something like the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and then the waste we have passed is only remembered to gladden the contrast." He who was so sparing of answers to his own detractors, could not allow a criticism against a friend to be left unanswered. We have seen how he defended Scott, Shelley, Coleridge, and numerous other remarkable persons, whenever they were unjustly attacked, although they were alive to defend themselves. The respect and justice which he claimed for the dead was equally proportioned. "Do not forget," he wrote to Moore on hearing that he was about to write the "Life of Sheridan;" "do not forget _to spare the living without insulting the dead_." On reading, at Ravenna, that Schlegel said, that Dante was not popular in Italy, and accused him of want of pathos: "'Tis false," said he, with indignation; "there have been more editors and commentators (and imitators ultimately) of Dante, than of all their poets put together. _Not_ a favorite! Why they talk Dante, write Dante, and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it. "In the same style this German talks of gondolas on the Arno--a precious fellow to dare to speak of Italy!