“If I were to begin life again, I would devote much time to music.  All
    musical people seem to me happy; it is the most engrossing pursuit;
    almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.”

When we turn from the aesthetic to the literary faculty, we find it a good deal better developed.  That he was a sound scholar in the sense of being able to read the standard classics with facility and enjoyment we know from his own statements.  In the early days of the Edinburgh Review he perceived and extolled the fine scholarship of Monk[164] and Blomfield[165] and Maltby.[166] The fact that Marsh[167] was a man of learning mitigated the severity of the attack on “Persecuting Bishops.”  His glowing tribute to the accomplishments of Sir James Mackintosh is qualified by the remark that “the Greek language has never crossed the Tweed in any great force.”  In brief, be understood and respected classical scholarship.  He was keenly interested in English literature, and kept abreast of what was produced in France; but German he seems to have regarded as a kind of joke, and Italian he only mentions as part of a young lady’s education.

In 1819 he wrote to his son at Westminster:—­

“For the English poets, I will let you off at present with Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Shakespeare; and remember, always in books, keep the best company.  Don’t read a line of Ovid till you have mastered Virgil; nor a line of Thomson till you have exhausted Pope; nor of Massinger, till you are familiar with Shakespeare.”

He thought Locke “a fine, satisfactory sort of a fellow, but very long-winded”; considered Horace Walpole’s “the best wit ever published in the shape of letters”; and dismissed Madame de Sevigne as “very much over-praised.”  Of Montaigne he says—­“He thinks aloud, that is his great merit, but does not think remarkably well.  Mankind has improved in thinking and writing since that period.”

It was, of course, part of his regular occupation to deal with new books in the Edinburgh; and, apart from these formal reviews, his letters are full of curious comments.  In 1814 he declines to read the Edinburgh’s criticism of Wordsworth, because “the subject is to me so very uninteresting.”  In the same year he writes:—­

    “I think very highly of Waverley, and was inclined to suspect, in
    reading it, that it was written by Miss Scott of Ancrum.”

In 1818 he wrote about The Heart of Midlothian:—­

“I think it excellent—­quite as good as any of his novels, excepting that in which Claverhouse is introduced, and of which I forget the name....  He repeats his characters, but it seems they will bear repetition.  Who can read the novel without laughing and crying twenty times?”

In 1820:—­

    “Have you read Ivanhoe?  It is the least dull, and the most easily
    read through, of all Scott’s novels; but there are many more
    powerful.”