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omission of Sackville occasions a grievous deficiency, while it affords the most undeniable proof of the editor's unfitness for his task. It is scarcely possible to conceive two persons performing the same work with feelings more different than Dr. Anderson and Mr. Chalmers. The former a thorough lover of poetry, indulgent to the artist for the sake of the art: the latter a thorough-paced professional critic, so entirely ignorant of his subject as to fancy that Glover used no trochees in his verse, and to class Prior, Gray, and Aikenside in the school of Spenser, and talk of their writings in the Spenserian stanza!

He has told us, that 'Poetry is the art of pleasing.' We will not attempt to define with equal precision what criticism is, but we will tell Mr. Chalmers what it is not. It is not the art of composing pompous sentences which swell like an inflated bladder, and are as empty as the bladder when you pick them for the meaning. It does not consist in talking of catelecties, and trochaics, and elisions. It is not displayed by choosing out half a dozen or half a score words from a poem containing as many thousand lines, and condemning them as too familiar for heroic poetry. It is not the art of finding fault. It is not, whatever ladies and gentlemen may think, common to all persons who have enjoyed the benefits of modern education. It requires long habits of thoughtful and comprehensive study, as well as intuition. It may be reduced to rules; but the best rules will no more make a man a critic, than they can make him a poet, painter, or musician, if the predisposing and innate faculty be wanting.

To good old Dr. Anderson the poets and the literature of this country are deeply beholden; it is with great pleasure that we render this tribute of justice to him while he is living to receive it. The booksellers, as their predecessors had done with Dr. Johnson's edition, would have begun the collection with Cowley. Dr. Anderson prevailed upon them to include some of the earlier and greater writers, and the four volumes which were thus appropriated, though fewer than he wished and were really required, gave the collection its chief, almost its only value. Many of the Elizabethan poets were thus, for the first time, made generally accessible, and if the good old school of poetry has been in some degree revived, Dr. Anderson has been mainly instrumental towards a reformation which was so devoutly to be wished for.

We have spoken severely of Mr. Chalmers, not exactly meeting to him with the same measure wherewith he has meted, for he has had fair measure at our hands. One who shows so little tenderness for the errors of others has no reason to expect any for his own. The critic who is convicted of incapacity deserves to be chastised, like the soldier who disgraces himself in the day of battle; he has thrust himself into a profession which makes weakness a crime.

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