New Essays towards a Critical Method. By John Mackinnon Robertson.
(John Lane.)—It is not easy to see what Mr. Robertson means by a "critical method." He gives us his views, ethical and literary—the literary being preferable, we cannot but think, to the ethical—on various writers of the nineteenth century, with incidental references to others. These views deserve attention, but we see no special principle running through them,—nothing, in short, that elevates them from occasional utterances into a harmonious and self-consistent science. " Poe " is distinctly good, though we could have wished that the writer had confined himself to the appreciation of Poe's literary powers. So is " Coleridge." We are less pleased with " Shelley " and " Keats." The depreciatory estimate of " Adonals" is par- ticularly distasteful. " Where Milton's rhetoric," he says, com- paring " Adonais " with " Lycidas," " is august and golden, Shelley's is hysterical, almost bombastic." " Wordy and theatrical," he calls it a little further on. Of course it suffers from comparison with " Thyrsis " and " In Memoriam," for it does not express a personal grief, but it is full of splendour and power, and, we should say, less academical than " Lycidas," with its too familiar classical properties. But it is endless work to criticise a critic.
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