not to be expected or even desired that
others should have these qualities in the same paramount degree, to the
exclusion of everything else. If you like correctness and smoothness
of all things in the world, there they are for you in Pope. If you like
other things better, such as strength and sublimity, you know where to
go for them. Why trouble Pope or any other author for what they have
not, and do not profess to give? Those who seem to imply that Pope
possessed, besides his own peculiar, exquisite merits, all that is to
be found in Shakespear or Milton, are, I should hardly think, in good
earnest. But I do not therefore see that, because this was not the case,
Pope was no poet. We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the
qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a
union by all the intolerance in the world. We may pull Pope in pieces as
long as we please for not being Shakespear or Milton, as we may carp
at them for not being Pope, but this will not make a poet equal to all
three. If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may
keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catho
and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to profusion in the variety
of books and in the several growth of men's minds, fettered by no
capricious or arbitrary rules. Those who would proscribe whatever falls
short of a given standard of imaginary perfection do so, not from a
higher capacity of taste or range of intellect than others, but to
destroy, to 'crib and cabin in' all enjoyments and opinions but their
own.

We find people of a decided and original, and others of a more general
and versatile taste. I have sometimes thought that the most acute and
original-minded men made bad critics. They see everything too much
through a particular medium. What does not fall in with their own bias
and mode of composition strikes them as common-place and factitious.
What does not come into the direct line of their vision, they regard
idly, with vacant, 'lack-lustre eye.' The extreme force of their
original impressions, compared with the feebleness of those they receive
at second-hand from others, oversets the balance and just proportion
of their minds. Men who have fewer native resources, and are obliged to
apply oftener to the general stock, acquire by habit a greater aptitude
in appreciating what they owe to others. Their taste is not made a
sacrifice to their egotism and vanity, and they