For itself in itself--for what it _is_--the present writer, though he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that it _did_, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration.

It is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull.

But it made people (we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and the shudder was exactly what they wanted--in every sense of the verb "to want." Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social, literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which people had been assured was not worth exploring.

Blair was just using, or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolical exemplification of the contemptible in literature.

Hume had been arguing against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition and supernaturalism.