In the eighteenth
century this mode of passing judgment was most naively manifest in
verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal
lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded,
without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In
the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to
prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same
simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral
reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart,
Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective
attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.]
It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that
considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The
highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though
poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his
critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his
protege, Kirke White, with poetical excellence.
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