different reading, or correcting, by the
collation of various copies, an error of the press. In appreciating a
modern one, if it is an enemy, the first thing he thinks of is to charge
him with bad grammar--he scans his sentences instead of weighing his
sense; or if it is a friend, the highest compliment he conceives it
possible to pay him is, that his thoughts and expressions are moulded
on some hackneyed model. His standard of _ideal_ perfection is what he
himself now is, a person of _mediocre_ literary attainments: his utmost
contempt is shewn by reducing any one to what he himself once was, a
person without the ordinary advantages of education and learning. It is
accordingly assumed, with much complacency in his critical pages, that
Tory writers are classical and courtly as a matter of course; as it is
a standing jest and evident truism, that Whigs and Reformers must be
persons of low birth and breeding--imputations from one of which he
himself has narrowly escaped, and both of which he holds in suitable
abhorrence. He stands over a contemporary performance with all the
self-conceit and self-importance of a country schoolmaster, tries it by
technical rules, affects not to understand the meaning, examines the
hand-writing, the spelling, shrugs up his shoulders and chuckles over a
slip of the pen, and keeps a sharp look-out for a false concord and--a
flogging. There is nothing liberal, nothing humane in his style of
judging: it is altogether petty, captious, and literal. The Editor's
political subserviency adds the last finishing to his ridiculous
pedantry and vanity. He has all his life been a follower in the train
of wealth and power--strives to back his pretensions on Parnassus by a
place at court, and to gild his reputation as a man of letters by the
smile of greatness. He thinks his works are stamped with additional
value by having his name in the _Red-Book_. He looks up to the
distinctions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, with
the gross and overweening adulation of his early origin. All his notions
are low, upstart, servile. He thinks it the highest honour to a poet to
be patronised by a peer or by some dowager of quality. He is prouder
of a court-livery than of a laurel-wreath; and is only sure of having
established his claims to respectability by having sacrificed those of
independence. He is a retainer to the Muses; a door-keeper to learning;
a lacquey in the state. He believes that modern li