elevated, and thus
addresses the critic:--

"You may, however, be safely defied to pronounce them, with truth,
deficient either in strength or melody of versification! They
were designed to be, like Virgil's, descriptive of Nature, simple
and correct. Had you been disposed to do me justice, you might
have observed that in these eclogues I had drawn from the great
prototype Nature, much imagery that had escaped the notice of
all my predecessors. You might also have remarked that when I
introduced images that had been already introduced by others,
still the arrangement or combination of those images was my own.
The praise of originality you might at least have allowed me."

As for their _incorrectness_!--Scott points that accusation with a
note of admiration, adding, "with whatever defects my works may be
chargeable, the last is that of _incorrectness_."

We are here involuntarily reminded of Sir Fretful, in _The Critic_:--

"I think the interest rather declines in the fourth act."

"Rises! you mean, my dear friend!"

Perhaps the most extraordinary examples of the irritation of a poet's
mind, and a man of amiable temper, are those parts of this letter in
which the author quotes large portions of his poetry, to refute the
degrading strictures of the reviewer.

This was a fertile principle, admitting of very copious extracts; but
the ludicrous attitude is that of an Adonis inspecting himself at his
mirror.

That provoking see-saw of criticism, which our learned physician
usually adopted in his critiques, was particularly tantalizing to the
poet of Amwell. The critic condemns, in the gross, a whole set of
eclogues; but immediately asserts of one of them, that "the whole of
it has great poetical merit, and paints its subject in the warmest
colours." When he came to review the odes, he discovers that "he does
not meet with those polished numbers, nor that freedom and spirit,
which that species of poetry requires;" and quotes half a stanza,
which he declares is "abrupt and insipid." "From twenty-seven odes!"
exclaims the writhing poet--"are the whole of my lyric productions to
be stigmatised for four lines which are flatter than those that
preceded them?" But what the critic could not be aware of, the poet
tells us--he designed them to be just what they are. "I knew they were
so when they were first written, but they were thought sufficiently
elevated for the place." And then he enters into an inquiry what the
criti