is
life; for after a lapse of years, he would still recur to it as an
evidence of the felicity of his fancy, and the keenness of his satire.
The truth is, he was a physician, whose name is prefixed as the editor
to a great medical compilation, and who never pretended that he had
any taste for poetry. His great art of poetical criticism was always,
as Pope expresses a character, "to dwell in decencies;" his acumen, to
detect that terrible poetic crime false rhymes, and to employ
indefinite terms, which, as they had no precise meaning, were
applicable to all things; to commend, occasionally, a passage not
always the most exquisite; sometimes to hesitate, while, with
delightful candour, he seemed to give up his opinion; to hazard
sometimes a positive condemnation on parts which often unluckily
proved the most favourite with the poet and the reader. Such was this
poetical reviewer, whom no one disturbed in his periodical course,
till the circumstance of a plain Quaker becoming a poet, and
fluttering in the finical ornaments of his book, provoked him from
that calm state of innocent mediocrity, into miserable humour, and
illiberal criticism.

The effect, however, this pert criticism had on poor Scott was indeed
a calamity. It produced an inconsiderate "Letter to the Critical
Reviewers." Scott was justly offended at the stigma of Quakerism,
applied to the author of a literary composition; but too gravely
accuses the critic of his scurrilous allusion to Macheath, as
comparing him to a highwayman; he seems, however, more provoked at the
odd account of his poems; he says, "You rank all my poems together as
_bad_, then discriminate some as _good_, and, to complete all,
recommend the volume as _an agreeable and amusing collection_." Had
the poet been personally acquainted with this tantalizing critic, he
would have comprehended the nature of the criticism--and certainly
would never have replied to it.

The critic, employing one of his indefinite terms, had said of
"Amwell," and some of the early "Elegies," that "they had their share
of poetical merit;" he does not venture to assign the proportion of
that share, but "the Amoebean and oriental eclogues, odes, epistles,
&c., now added, are _of a much weaker feature, and many of them
incorrect_."

Here Scott loses all his dignity as a Quaker and a poet--he asks what
the critic means by the affected phrase _much weaker feature_; the
style, he says, was designed to be somewhat less