shed
specimens of success in either department; just as they are said to
possess the best possible rules for building ships of war, although not
equally remarkable for their power of fighting them. When criticism
becomes a pursuit separate from poetry, those who follow it are apt to
forget, that the legitimate ends of the art for which they lay down
rules, are instruction or delight, and that these points being attained,
by what road soever, entitles a poet to claim the prize of successful
merit. Neither did the learned authors of these disquisitions
sufficiently attend to the general disposition of mankind, which cannot
be contented even with the happiest imitations of former excellence, but
demands novelty as a necessary ingredient for amusement. To insist that
every epic poem shall have the plan of the Iliad and AEneid, and every
tragedy be fettered by the rules of Aristotle, resembles the principle
of an architect, who should build all his houses with the same number of
windows, and of stories. It happened too, inevitably, that the critics,
in the plenipotential authority which they exercised, often assumed as
indispensable requisites of the drama, or epopeia, circumstances, which,
in the great authorities they quoted, were altogether accidental and
indifferent. These they erected into laws, and handed down as essentials
to be observed by all succeeding poets; although the forms prescribed
have often as little to do with the merit and success of the originals
from which they are taken, as the shape of the drinking-glass with the
flavour of the wine which it contains. "To these encroachments," says
Fielding, after some observations to the same purpose, "time and
ignorance, the two great supporters of imposture, gave authority; and
thus many rules for good writing have been established, which have not
the least foundation in truth or nature; and which commonly serve for no
other purpose than to curb and restrain genius, in the same manner as it
would have restrained the dancing-master, had the many excellent
treatises on that art laid it down as an essential rule, that every man
must dance in chains."[25] It is probable, that the tyranny of the
French critics, fashionable as the literature of that country was with
Charles and his courtiers, would have extended itself over England at
the Restoration, had not a champion so powerful as Dryden placed himself
in the gap. We have mentioned in its place his "Essay on Dramatic