enius is able to make
beautiful what he pleases: Yet, as he has been too favourable to me, I
doubt not but he will hear of his kindness from many of our
contemporaries for we are fallen into an age of illiterate,
censorious, and detracting people, who, thus qualified, set up for
critics.

In the first place, I must take leave to tell them, that they wholly
mistake the nature of criticism, who think its business is principally
to find fault. Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was
meant a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is, to
observe those excellencies which should delight a reasonable reader.
If the design, the conduct, the thoughts, and the expressions of a
poem, be generally such as proceed from a true genius of poetry, the
critic ought to pass his judgement in favour of the author. It is
malicious and unmanly to snarl at the little lapses of a pen, from
which Virgil himself stands not exempted. Horace acknowledges, that
honest Homer nods sometimes: He is not equally awake in every line;
but he leaves it also as a standing measure for our judgments,

--Non, _ubi plura nitent in carmine, paucis_
Offendi _maculis, quas aut incuria fudit,
Aut humana parum cavit natura._--

And Longinus, who was undoubtedly, after Aristotle the greatest critic
amongst the Greeks, in his twenty-seventh chapter, [Greek: PERI
HUPSOUS], has judiciously preferred the sublime genius that sometimes
errs, to the middling or indifferent one, which makes few faults, but
seldom or never rises to any excellence. He compares the first to a
man of large possessions, who has not leisure to consider of every
slight expence, will not debase himself to the management of every
trifle: Particular sums are not laid out, or spared, to the greatest
advantage in his economy; but are sometimes suffered to run to waste,
while he is only careful of the main. On the other side, he likens the
mediocrity of wit, to one of a mean fortune, who manages his store
with extreme frugality, or rather parsimony; but who, with fear of
running into profuseness, never arrives to the magnificence of living.
This kind of genius writes indeed correctly. A wary man he is in
grammar, very nice as to solecism or barbarism, judges to a hair of
little decencies, knows better than any man what is not to be written,
and never hazards himself so far as to fall, but plods on
deliberately, and, as a grave man ought, is sure to put his staff
bef