is name,
and which he expected succeeding ages to regard with veneration. His
affection was, natural; it had undoubtedly been written with great
labour; and who is willing to think that he has been labouring in vain?
He had infused into it much knowledge and much thought; had often
polished it to elegance, often dignified it with splendour, and
sometimes heightened it to sublimity: he perceived in it many
excellencies, and did not discover that it wanted that without which all
others are of small avail, the power of engaging attention and alluring
curiosity.

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults; negligences or errours are
single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole; other faults are
censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself.
He that is weary the first hour, is more weary the second; as bodies
forced into motion contrary to their tendency, pass more and more slowly
through every successive interval of space.

Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able
to discover. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves; and the act of
composition fills and delights the mind with change of language and
succession of images; every couplet, when produced, is new, and novelty
is the great source of pleasure. Perhaps no man ever thought a line
superfluous when he first wrote it, or contracted his work till his
ebullitions of invention had subsided. And even if he should control his
desire of immediate renown, and keep his work nine years unpublished, he
will be still the author, and still in danger of deceiving himself: and
if he consults his friends, he will, probably, find men who have more
kindness than judgment, or more fear to offend, than desire to instruct.

The tediousness of this poem proceeds not from the uniformity of the
subject, for it is sufficiently diversified, but from the continued
tenour of the narration; in which Solomon relates the successive
vicissitudes of his own mind, without the intervention of any other
speaker, or the mention of any other agent, unless it be Abra; the
reader is only to learn what he thought, and to be told that he thought
wrong. The event of every experiment is foreseen, and, therefore, the
process is not much regarded.

Yet the work is far from deserving to be neglected. He that shall peruse
it will be able to mark many passages, to which he may recur for
instruction or delight; many from which the poet may learn to write,