CRITICISM. 



" Cum talniKs animum censoris sumet ho- 

 nesti." 



And for the direction of his judgment 

 he can take no guide so sure, as those 

 principles which have been sanctioned by 

 the approbation of enlightened ages, as 

 the laws of just taste. 



To enter into a regular detail of the 

 objects embraced in a system of the 

 rules of criticism would be inconsistent 

 with the design of the present work ; 

 but a short enumeration of the princi- 

 pal writers on the subject may not be 

 altogether useless. 



Aristotle is the great father of the critic 

 art ; and his treatises on Poetry and Rhe- 

 toric exhibit the fundamental principles 

 on which that art is built. His style is 

 compressed and abrupt; and his lan- 

 guage is so devoid of the attractions of 

 ornament, that, as a celebrated French 

 scholar has justly observed, " in order 

 to be able to read his works, a person 

 must be fully bent upon obtaining in- 

 struction. The dryness of his manner, 

 however, is amply compensated by the 

 perspicuity of his arrangement, the in- 

 genuity of his disquisitinns, and the pro- 

 fundity of his thoughts. Many useful 

 observations on the general principles 

 of composition are to be found in Ci- 

 cero's treatises on the subject of orato- 

 ry ; and the Institutes of Quintilian also 

 contain a rich mine of criticism. Much 

 useful instruction may also be gained from 

 the critical dissertations, which occasion- 

 ally occur in the Satires and Epistles of 

 Horace, and especially in his Epistle to 

 the Pises on the art of Poetry. Longinus's 

 work on the Sublime, though occasional- 

 ly deficient in precision, is written with 

 singular energy and spirit, and evinces a 

 feeling mind, the emotions of which are 

 regulated by exquisite taste. 



The spirit of Horace was infused into 

 Boileau, who, of all the French critics, 

 was the most delicate in judgment; though 

 much praise is also due to the critical 

 works of Hapin, Bossu, and Bonhours. 

 Rollin's treatise on the Belle Lettres is a 

 book of great value ; and in our own 

 days, the seeds of good taste have been 

 widely scattered through the continent of 

 Europe by the publication of La Harpe's 

 Lycee. 



The English language is rich in critical 

 disquisitions, of wh'ch many excellent 

 ones are to be found in the prefaces pre- 

 fixed by Dryden to his multifarious pro- 

 ductions. In his " Advice to an Author," 

 Lord Shaftesbury has well asserted the 



dignity and importance of the art of criti- 

 cism, and has detailed, in measured tind 

 elevated style,the principles offine writ- 

 ing, which he had collected from the 

 study of the ancients. Pope's Essay on 

 Criticism is too well known to stand in 

 need of commendation ; and the critique 

 of Addison on the Paradise Lost is perus- 

 ed with interest by every Englishman of 

 cultivated mind. At a more modern pe- 

 riod, Mr. Harris, in his Philological En- 

 quiries, has exhibited the substance of 

 the writings of Aristotle; and Dr. John- 

 son, in his observations upon the works 

 of the English Poets, has, notwithstanding 

 the occasional aberrations into which he 

 was betrayed by prejudice, given decisive 

 proofs of a superior intellect. Ward's 

 Treatise on Oratory, Priestley's Lectures 

 on Oratory and Criticism, and Kaimes's 

 Elements of Criticism, respectively con- 

 tain systems of considerable merit. But 

 the standard book on this subject is Blair's 

 Lectures on Belles Lettres. Blair was a 

 scholar and a philosopher ; and his works 

 only want a portion of the spirit of en- 

 thusiasm, to render them a complete mo- 

 del of didactic composition. 



CRITICISM, verbal, is the art of settling, 

 with probability, or, as a practitioner of 

 that art would say, with precision, the 

 text of the ancient Greek and Latin clas- 

 sic authors. This species of criticism takes 

 its rise from the state in which the writ- 

 ings of those authors have come down to 

 modern times. The art of printing being 

 unknown at the period when they were 

 composed, they were preserved by tran- 

 scription ; from which circumstance they 

 were evidently liable to be deformed by 

 errors, and those errors must .necessarily 

 have been greatly multiplied by the lapse 

 of ages. A passage in Aulus Gellius, 

 which states that a reading in Cicero was 

 justified by a copy made by his learned 

 freedman Tyro, and a reading in Virgil's 

 Georgics by a book which had formerly 

 belonged to Virgil's family, at once de- 

 monstrates the early corruption of works 

 of taste, and the early stress which was 

 laid upon the authority of ancient manu- 

 scripts. 



In the long night of ignorance, which 

 succeeded the subversion of the Roman 

 empire by the barbarians of the north, the 

 classic authors were forgotten, and their 

 works were neglected, and left to perish. 

 But when literature revived in Italy, they 

 became the objects of the most eager and 

 diligent research. In the fifteenth and 

 sixteenth centuries, the discovery of an 

 ancient Greek or Latin manuscript was 



