utely or
irreversibly incompatible with the sterner gifts of energetic attention
and powerful abstraction, were undoubtedly not in alliance with them.
The two sets of gifts did not exert a reciprocal stimulation. As well
might one expect from a man, because he was a capital shot, that he
should write the best essay on the theory of projectiles. Horace and
Pope, therefore, would have talked so absurdly in justifying or
explaining their own works, that we--naturally impatient of nonsense on
the subject of criticism, as our own _metier_--should have said, 'Oh,
dear gentlemen, stand aside for a moment, and we will right you in the
eyes of posterity: at which bar, if either of you should undertake to be
his own advocate, he will have a fool for his client.'

We do and must concede consideration even to the one-sided pleadings of
an advocate. But it is under the secret assumption of the concurrent
pleadings equally exaggerated on the adverse side. Without this
counterweight, how false would be our final summation of the evidence
upon most of the great state trials! Nay, even with both sides of the
equation before us, how perplexing would be that summation generally,
unless under the moderating guidance of a neutral and indifferent eye;
the eye of the judge in the first instance, and subsequently of the
upright historian--whether watching the case from the station of a
contemporary, or reviewing it from his place in some later generation.

Now what we wish to observe about Criticism is, that with just the same
temptation to personal partiality and even injustice in extremity, it
offers a much wider latitude to the distortion of things, facts,
grounds, and inferences. In fact, with the very same motives to a
personal bias swerving from the equatorial truth, it makes a much wider
opening for giving effect to those motives. Insincerity in short, and
every mode of contradicting the truth, is far more possible under a
professed devotion to a general principle than any personal expression
could possibly be.

If the logic of the case be steadily examined, a definition of didactic
poetry will emerge the very opposite to that popularly held: it will
appear that in didactic poetry the teaching is not the _power_, but the
_resistance_. It is difficult to teach even playfully or mimically in
reconciliation with poetic effect: and the object is to wrestle with
this difficulty. It is as when a man selects an absurd or nearly
impracticabl