asses of men; for where the understanding of an Author
is not convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without
great injury to himself: for his own feelings are his stay and support;
and, if he set them aside in one instance, he may be induced to repeat
this act till his mind shall lose all confidence in itself, and become
utterly debilitated. To this it may be added, that the Critic ought
never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same errors as the
Poet, and, perhaps, in a much greater degree: for there can be no
presumption in saying of most readers, that it is not probable they will
be so well acquainted with the various stages of meaning through which
words have passed, or with the fickleness or stability of the relations
of particular ideas to each other; and, above all, since they are so
much less interested in the subject, they may decide lightly and
carelessly.

Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope he will permit me to
caution him against a mode of false criticism which has been applied to
Poetry, in which the language closely resembles that of life and nature.
Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies, of which Dr. Johnson's
stanza is a fair specimen:--

I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.

Immediately under these lines let us place one of the most
justly-admired stanzas of the 'Babes in the Wood.'

These pretty Babes with hand in hand
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the Man
Approaching from the Town.

In both these stanzas the words, and the order of the words, in no
respect differ from the most unimpassioned conversation. There are words
in both, for example, 'the Strand,' and 'the Town,' connected with none
but the most familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as admirable,
and the other as a fair example of the superlatively contemptible.
Whence arises this difference? Not from the metre, not from the
language, not from the order of the words; but the _matter_ expressed in
Dr. Johnson's stanza is contemptible. The proper method of treating
trivial and simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson's stanza would be a fair
parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind of poetry, or, this is
not poetry; but, this wants sense; it is neither interesting in itself,
nor can _lead_ to any thing interesting; the images neither originate in
that sane sta