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Lord Jeffrey and Wordsworth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Commonsense is a bourgeois virtue, anathema to the temperamental, a red rag to the radical. It disgusts and terrifies the aesthete: it reminds him almost too baldly of the unlegalized reasoning of his middle-class readers. The common-sense reason of the populace, sometimes personified in a critic, hounds the eccentric genius on to wilder vagaries than he would have dared to indulge in unpursued. And, in its turn, abstract reason, fearing an invasion of its prerogatives, occasionally bursts its traditional leash of self-restraint and leaps bare-fanged upon its victims. But be the critic what he may, Time, the most inexorable of critics, judges an author at last by the standards of commonsense. Reason, experience, and intellectual honesty are its component parts: sanity is its ideal.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1923
References
1 Merritt Y. Hughes, “The Humanism of Francis Jeffrey,” Mod. Lang. Review XVI, 243ff.
2 Edinburgh Review, I, 64.
3 Edinburgh Review, I, 71-2.
4 G. McL. Harper, William Wordsworth. His Life, Works, and Influence. In two volumes. II, 135.
5 Edinburgh Review, I, 67.
6 Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to The Edinburgh Review. Four volumes complete in one. Boston, 1856, p. 346.
7 Ibid., pp. 468-9.
8 Edinburgh Review, XI, 215.
9 Edinburgh Review, XI, 231.
10 Edinburgh Review, XI, 214.
11 Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, p. 458.
12 Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, p. 459.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 460.
15 Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, p. 464.
16 Ibid., p. 465.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 469.
19 Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, p. 470.
20 Ibid., pp. 469-70.
21 Ibid.
22 Jeffrey, Contributions to the. Edinburgh Review, p. 457, note.
23 Ibid.
24 Harper, op. cit., II, 360.
25 Ibid.
26 H. C. Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence. . . . Selected and Edited by Thomas Sadler, Ph.D. In three volumes, London, 1869, I, 304.
27 Ibid., III, 140.
28 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited . . . by J. Shawcross. Two volumes, Oxford, 1907. II, 107-8.
29 Ibid., p. 109.
30 Ibid.
31 W. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age . . . Fourth Edition. Ed. by W. Carew Hazlitt, London, 1886. pp. 162-3.
32 T. Carlyle, Reminiscences. Ed. by James Anthony Froude, N. Y., 1881. p. 199.
33 L. E. Gates, Three Studies in Literature, N. Y., 1899, p. 25.
34 Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, Boston and New York, 1919. p. 286.
35 Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 249.
36 Jeffrey, Collected Essays, p. 459.
37 Babbitt, op. cit., p. 296.