it is a friend, the highest compliment he conceives it possible to pay him is, that his thoughts and expressions are moulded on some hackneyed model.  His standard of ideal perfection is what he himself now is, a person of mediocre literary attainments:  his utmost contempt is shewn by reducing any one to what he himself once was, a person without the ordinary advantages of education and learning.  It is accordingly assumed, with much complacency in his critical pages, that Tory writers are classical and courtly as a matter of course; as it is a standing jest and evident truism, that Whigs and Reformers must be persons of low birth and breeding—­imputations from one of which he himself has narrowly escaped, and both of which he holds in suitable abhorrence.  He stands over a contemporary performance with all the self-conceit and self-importance of a country schoolmaster, tries it by technical rules, affects not to understand the meaning, examines the hand-writing, the spelling, shrugs up his shoulders and chuckles over a slip of the pen, and keeps a sharp look-out for a false concord and—­a flogging.  There is nothing liberal, nothing humane in his style of judging:  it is altogether petty, captious, and literal.  The Editor’s political subserviency adds the last finishing to his ridiculous pedantry and vanity.  He has all his life been a follower in the train of wealth and power—­strives to back his pretensions on Parnassus by a place at court, and to gild his reputation as a man of letters by the smile of greatness.  He thinks his works are stamped with additional value by having his name in the Red-Book.  He looks up to the distinctions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, with the gross and overweening adulation of his early origin.  All his notions are low, upstart, servile.  He thinks it the highest honour to a poet to be patronised by a peer or by some dowager of quality.  He is prouder of a court-livery than of a laurel-wreath; and is only sure of having established his claims to respectability by having sacrificed those of independence.  He is a retainer to the Muses; a door-keeper to learning; a lacquey in the state.  He believes that modern literature should wear the fetters of classical antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the scales of opinion and prejudice; that power is equivalent to right; that genius is dependent on rules; that taste and refinement of language consist in word-catching.  Many persons suppose that Mr. Gifford knows better than he pretends; and that he is shrewd, artful, and designing.  But perhaps it may be nearer the mark to suppose that his dulness is guarantee for his sincerity; or that before he is the tool of the profligacy of others, he is the dupe of his own jaundiced feelings, and narrow, hoodwinked perceptions.

  “Destroy his fib or sophistry:  in vain—­
  The creature’s at his dirty work again!”