ABSTRACT

There is no quality of the mind more despicable than that love of censure and ridicule which has its origin in our own weakness, and which hunts for faults or singularities, not for the purpose of amending them, but for the sake of gratifying an imaginary superiority: those who thus flatter their vanity by reducing genius to the degraded level of their own understandings, who ‘damn the worth they cannot imitate’, may find in the fragment before us some food to satisfy their diseased appetite; while those on the other hand who are hopeful yet humble, emulous yet not envious, who triumph in every fresh display of talent and genius as a fresh incentive to exertion, will read with generous enthusiasm the pages upon our table. If we had no other reason for so thinking, than the rapid sale of this poem, 1 we should judge that the latter are a very numerous class: to the former Ben Jonson alludes in his Discoveries where he says that ‘Critics are a sort of Tinkers, who ordinarily make more faults than they mend’. As it is a maxim of the criminal law of England, that it is better to find one man innocent than to convict ten men as guilty, so it ought to be a maxim of the critical law of literature, that it is more advantageous to point out one beauty than to discover ten deformities.