His power of concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given us his best critical work--nothing could be better, for instance, than his characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school (Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of his life of Cowley.

Even where he is most prejudiced--for instance in his attack on Milton's _Lycidas_--there is usually something to be said for his point of view.

And after this concentration, his excellence depends on his basic common sense.

His classicism is always tempered, like Dryden's, by a humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store by the unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a "classic" could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in truth, some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean literature.

Of course, he had his failings--the greatest of them what Lamb called imperfect sympathy.