or to
exaggerate those which you may really have, but they deny that you have
any merits at all, least of all those that the world have given you
credit for; bless themselves from understanding a single sentence in
a whole volume; and unless you are ready to subscribe to all their
articles of peace, will not allow you to be qualified to write your
own name. It is not a question of literary discussion, but of political
proscription. It is a mark of loyalty and patriotism to extend no
quarter to those of the opposite party. Instead of replying to your
arguments, they call you names, put words and opinions into your mouth
which you have never uttered, and consider it a species of misprision
of treason to admit that a Whig author knows anything of common sense
or English. The only chance of putting a stop to this unfair mode of
dealing would perhaps be to make a few reprisals by way of example. The
Court party boast some writers who have a reputation to lose, and who
would not like to have their names dragged through the kennel of
dirty abuse and vulgar obloquy. What silenced the masked battery of
_Blackwood's Magazine_ was the implication of the name of Sir Walter
Scott in some remarks upon it--(an honour of which it seems that
extraordinary person was not ambitious)--to be 'pilloried on infamy's
high stage' was a distinction and an amusement to the other gentlemen
concerned in that praiseworthy publication. I was complaining not long
ago of this prostitution of literary criticism as peculiar to our own
times, when I was told that it was just as bad in the time of Pope and
Dryden, and indeed worse, inasmuch as we have no Popes or Drydens now on
the obnoxious side to be nicknamed, metamorphosed into scarecrows, and
impaled alive by bigots and dunces. I shall not pretend to say how far
this remark may be true. The English (it must be owned) are rather a
foul-mouthed nation.

Besides temporary or accidental biases of this kind, there seem to be
sects and parties in taste and criticism (with a set of appropriate
watchwords) coeval with the arts of composition, and that will last
as long as the difference with which men's minds are originally
constituted. There are some who are all for the elegance of an author's
style, and some who are equally delighted with simplicity. The last
refer you to Swift as a model of English prose, thinking all other
writers sophisticated and naught; the former prefer the more ornamented
and spark