the completion of his literary character. The
sciences are more independent, and require little or no assistance
from the graces of poetry; but poetry, if she would charm and instruct,
must not be so haughty; she must be contented to borrow of the sciences,
many of her choicest allusions, and many of her most graceful
embellishments; and does it not magnify the character of true poesy,
that she includes within herself all the scattered graces of every
separate art?

THE rules of the great masters in criticism may not be so necessary to
the forming a good taste, as the examination of those original mines
from whence they drew their treasures of knowledge.

THE three celebrated Essays on the Art of Poetry do not teach so much
by their laws as by their examples; the dead letter of their rules is
less instructive than the living spirit of their verse. Yet these rules
are to a young poet, what the study of logarithms is to a young
mathematician; they do not so much contribute to form his judgment, as
afford him the satisfaction of convincing him that he is right. They do
not preclude the difficulty of the operation; but at the conclusion of
it, furnish him with a fuller demonstration that he has proceeded on
proper principles. When he has well studied the masters in whose
schools the first critics formed themselves, and fancies he has caught a
spark of their divine Flame, it may be a good method to try his own
compositions by the test of the critic rules, so far indeed as the
mechanism of poetry goes. If the examination be fair and candid, this
trial, like the touch of Ithuriel's spear, will detect every latent
error, and bring to light every favourite failing.

GOOD taste always suits the measure of its admiration to the merit of
the composition it examines. It accommodates its praises, or its
censure, to the excellence of a work, and appropriates it to the nature
of it. General applause, or indiscriminate abuse, is the sign of a
vulgar understanding. There are certain blemishes which the judicious
and good-natured reader will candidly overlook. But the false sublime,
the tumour which is intended for greatness, the distorted figure, the
puerile conceit, and the incongruous metaphor, these are defects for
which scarcely any other kind of merit can atone. And yet there may be
more hope of a writer (especially if he be a a young one), who is now
and then guilty of some of these faults, than of one who avoids them
all, not t