Mr. Gifford, as a satirist, is violent and abrupt.  He takes obvious or physical defects, and dwells upon them with much labour and harshness of invective, but with very little wit or spirit.  He expresses a great deal of anger and contempt, but you cannot tell very well why—­except that he seems to be sore and out of humour.  His satire is mere peevishness and spleen, or something worse—­personal antipathy and rancour.  We are in quite as much pain for the writer, as for the object of his resentment.  His address to Peter Pindar is laughable from its outrageousness.  He denounces him as a wretch hateful to God and man, for some of the most harmless and amusing trifles that ever were written—­and the very good-humour and pleasantry of which, we suspect, constituted their offence in the eyes of this Drawcansir.—­His attacks on Mrs. Robinson were unmanly, and even those on Mr. Merry and the Della-Cruscan School were much more ferocious than the occasion warranted.  A little affectation and quaintness of style did not merit such severity of castigation.[C] As a translator, Mr. Gifford’s version of the Roman satirist is the baldest, and, in parts, the most offensive of all others.  We do not know why he attempted it, unless he had got it in his head that he should thus follow in the steps of Dryden, as he had already done in those of Pope in the Baviad and Maeviad.  As an editor of old authors, Mr. Gifford is entitled to considerable praise for the pains he has taken in revising the text, and for some improvements he has introduced into it.  He had better have spared the notes, in which, though he has detected the blunders of previous commentators, he has exposed his own ill-temper and narrowness of feeling more.  As a critic, he has thrown no light on the character and spirit of his authors.  He has shewn no striking power of analysis nor of original illustration, though he has chosen to exercise his pen on writers most congenial to his own turn of mind, from their dry and caustic vein; Massinger, and Ben Jonson.  What he will make of Marlowe, it is difficult to guess.  He has none of “the fiery quality” of the poet.  Mr. Gifford does not take for his motto on these occasions—­Spiritus precipitandus est!—­His most successful efforts in this way are barely respectable.  In general, his observations are petty, ill-concocted, and discover as little tact, as they do a habit of connected reasoning.  Thus, for instance, in attempting to add the name of Massinger to the list of Catholic poets, our minute critic insists on the profusion of crucifixes, glories, angelic visions, garlands of roses, and clouds of incense scattered through the Virgin-Martyr, as evidence of the theological sentiments meant to be inculcated by the play, when the least reflection might have taught him, that they proved nothing but the author’s poetical conception of the character and costume of his subject.  A writer might, with the same sinister, short-sighted