ce. Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and
insipid--

An ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet!

Nothing goes down with them but what is _caviare_ to the multitude.
They are eaters of olives and readers of black-letter. Yet they smack of
genius, and would be worth any money, were it only for the rarity of the
thing!

The last sort I shall mention are _verbal critics_--mere word-catchers,
fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume,
and tell you it is wrong.(6) These erudite persons constantly find out
by anticipation that you are deficient in the smallest things--that
you cannot spell certain words or join the nominative case and the verb
together, because to do this is the height of their own ambition, and
of course they must set you down lower than their opinion of themselves.
They degrade by reducing you to their own standard of merit; for the
qualifications they deny you, or the faults they object, are so very
insignificant, that to prove yourself possessed of the one or free from
the other is to make yourself doubly ridiculous. Littleness is their
element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch.
They creep, buzz, and fly-blow. It is much easier to crush than to
catch these troublesome insects; and when they are in your power your
self-respect spares them. The race is almost extinct:--one or two
of them are sometimes seen crawling over the pages of the _Quarterly
Review!_

NOTES to ESSAY VI

(1) A Mr. Rose and the Rev. Dr. Kippis were for many years its principal
support. Mrs. Rose (I have heard my father say) contributed the Monthly
Catalogue. There is sometimes a certain tartness and the woman's tongue
in it. It is said of Gray's _Elegy_, 'This little poem, however humble
its pretensions, is not without elegance or merit.' The characters of
prophet and critic are not always united.

(2) There are some splendid exceptions to this censure. His comparison
between Ovid and Virgil and his character of Shakespear are masterpieces
of their kind.

(3) We have critics In the present day (1821) who cannot tell what to
make of the tragic writers of Queen Elizabeth's age (except Shakespear,
who passes by prescriptive right), and are extremely puzzled to reduce
the efforts of their 'great and irregular' power to the standard of
their own slight and showy common-places. The truth is, they had better
give up the attempt to reconcile such contradictions a