mischief. No genius was ever blasted by
the breath of criticks. The poison which, if confined, would have burst
the heart, fumes away in empty hisses, and malice is set at ease with
very little danger to merit. The critick is the only man whose triumph
is without another's pain, and whose greatness does not rise upon
another's ruin.

To a study at once so easy and so reputable, so malicious and so
harmless, it cannot be necessary to invite my readers by a long or
laboured exhortation; it is sufficient, since all would be criticks if
they could, to show, by one eminent example, that all can be criticks if
they will.

Dick Minim, after the common course of puerile studies, in which he was
no great proficient, was put an apprentice to a brewer, with whom he had
lived two years, when his uncle died in the city, and left him a large
fortune in the stocks. Dick had for six months before used the company
of the lower players, of whom he had learned to scorn a trade, and,
being now at liberty to follow his genius, he resolved to be a man of
wit and humour. That he might be properly initiated in his new
character, he frequented the coffee-houses near the theatres, where he
listened very diligently, day after day, to those who talked of language
and sentiments, and unities and catastrophes, till, by slow degrees, he
began to think that be understood something of the stage, and hoped in
time to talk himself.

But he did not trust so much to natural sagacity as wholly to neglect
the help of books. When the theatres were shut, he retired to Richmond
with a few select writers, whose opinions he impressed upon his memory
by unwearied diligence; and, when he returned with other wits to the
town, was able to tell, in very proper phrases, that the chief business
of art is to copy nature; that a perfect writer is not to be expected,
because genius decays as judgment increases; that the great art is the
art of blotting; and that, according to the rule of Horace, every piece
should be kept nine years.

Of the great authors he now began to display the characters, laying down
as an universal position, that all had beauties and defects. His opinion
was, that Shakespeare, committing himself wholly to the impulse of
nature, wanted that correctness which learning would have given him; and
that Jonson, trusting to learning, did not sufficiently cast his eyes on
nature. He blamed the stanzas of Spenser, and could not bear the
hexameters of Sid