criticism on that essay as literature?  The man of letters likes to read from a complete Spectator as he does from a complete Wordsworth.  At the same time, the best of Addison, as of Wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, and this is the final proof of its literary excellence.  The taste for eighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literary antiquarianism—­a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly necessary to the enjoyment of Addison’s genius.

But it is neither Pope nor Addison who is ultimately Mr. Saintsbury’s idol among the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century.  His idol of idols is Swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love and admire Dr. Johnson and Fielding.  He makes no bones about confessing his preference of Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais and Moliere.  Swift does not at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many people.  Mr. Saintsbury glorifies Gulliver, and wisely so, right down to the last word about the Houyhnhnms, and he demands for the Journal to Stella recognition as “the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography.”  His ultimate burst of appreciation is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called Saintsburyese—­not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its oddity of phrase and metaphor: 

Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most terrible forms, quelque chose d’infini, and the refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic restoratives—­the very strychnine and capsicum of irony.

But what, above all, attracts Mr. Saintsbury in Swift, Fielding and Johnson is their eminent manliness.  He is an enthusiast within limits for the genius of Sterne and the genius of Horace Walpole.  But he loves them in a grudging way.  He is disgusted with their lack of muscle.  He admits of the characters in Tristrom Shandy that “they are ... much more intrinsically true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters of Dickens,” but he is too greatly shocked by Sterne’s humour to be just to his work as a whole.  It is the same with Walpole’s letters.  Mr. Saintsbury will heap sentence after sentence of praise upon them, till one would imagine they were his favourite eighteenth-century literature.  He even defends Walpole’s character against Macaulay, but in the result he damns him with faint praise quite as effectively as Macaulay did.  That he has an enviable appetite for Walpole’s letters is shown by the fact that, in speaking of Mrs. Toynbee’s huge sixteen-volume edition of them, he observes that “even a single reading of it will supply the evening requirements of a man who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt the