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allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have

thought the AEneid to have been a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he

well might have thought so; for he preferred Pope's Iliad to Homer's.

He pronounced that after Hoole's translation of Tasso, Fairfax's would

hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine old English

ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Dr.

Percy's fondness for them.



Of all the great original works which appeared during his time,

Richardson's novels alone excited his admiration. He could see little

or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver's Travels, or in Tristram

Shandy. To Thomson's Castle of Indolence he vouchsafed only a line of

cold commendation--of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed

on The Creation of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray

was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The

contempt which he felt for Macpherson was, indeed, just; but it was, we

suspect, just by by chance. He criticized Pope's epitaphs excellently.

But his observations on Shakspeare's plays, and Milton's poems, seem to

us as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer himself, whom we

take to have been the worst critic that ever lived.



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