<i>No. 60.  Saturday, 9 June 1759.</i>
 
Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable
at very small expence.  The power of invention has been conferred
by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences
which may, by mere labour, be obtained, is too great to be
willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he
has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak,
and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the
name of a critick.
 
I hope it will give comfort to great numbers who are passing
thro' the world in obscurity, when I inform them how easily
distinction may be obtained.  All the other powers of literature
are coy and haughty, they must be long courted, and at last are
not always gained; but criticism is a goddess easy of access and
forward of advance, who will meet the slow and encourage the
timorous; the want of meaning she supplies with words, and the
want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.
 
This profession has one recommendation peculiar to itself, that
it gives vent to malignity without real mischief.  No genius was
ever blasted by the breath of criticks.  The poison which, if
confined, would have burst the heart, fumes away in empty hisses,
and malice is set at ease with very little danger to merit.  The
critick is the only man whose triumph is without another's pain,
and whose greatness does not rise upon another's ruin.
 
To a study at once so easy and so reputable, so malicious and so
harmless, it cannot be necessary to invite my readers by a long
or laboured exhortation; it is sufficient, since all would be
criticks if they could, to shew by one eminent example that all
can be critics if they will.
 
Dick Minim, after the common course of puerile studies, in which
he was no great proficient, was put an apprentice to a brewer,
with whom he had lived two years, when his uncle died in the
city, and left him a large fortune in the stocks.  Dick had for
six months before used the company of the lower players, of whom
he had learned to scorn a trade, and being now at liberty to
follow his genius, he resolved to be a man of wit and humour. 
That he might be properly initiated in his new character, he
frequented the coffee-houses near the theatres, where he listened
very diligently, day after day, to those who talked of language
and sentiments, and unities and catastrophes, till by slow
degrees he began to think that he understood something of the
stage, and hoped in time to talk himself.
 
But he did not trust so much to natural sagacity, as wholly to
neglect the help of books.  When the theatres were shut, he
retired to Richmond with a few select writers, whose opinions he
impressed upon his memory by unwearied diligence; and when he
returned with other wits to the town, was able to tell, in very
proper phrases, that the chief business of art is to copy nature;
that a perfect writer is not to be expected, because genius
decays as judgment increases; that the great art is the art of
blotting, and that, according to the rule of Horace every piece
should be kept nine years.
 
Of the great authors he now began to display the characters,
laying down as an universal position that all had beauties and
defects.  His opinion was, that Shakspear, committing himself
wholly to the impulse of nature, wanted that correctness which
learning would have given him; and that Johnson, trusting to
learning, did not sufficiently cast his eye on nature.  He blamed
the stanza of Spenser, and could not bear the hexameters of
Sidney.  Denham and Waller he held the first reformers of English
numbers, and thought that if Waller could have obtained the
strength of Denham, or Denham the sweetness of Waller, there had
been nothing wanting to complete a poet.  He often expressed his
commiseration of Dryden s poverty, and his indignation at the age
which suffered him to write for bread; he repeated with rapture
the first lines of <i>All for Love</i>, but wondered at the
corruption of taste which could bear any thing so unnatural as
rhyming tragedies.  In Otway he found uncommon powers of moving
the passions, but was disgusted by his general negligence, and
blamed him for making a conspirator his hero; and never concluded
his disquisition without remarking how happily the sound of the
clock is made to alarm the audience.  Southern would have been
his favourite, but that he mixes comick with tragick scenes,
intercepts the natural course of the passions, and fills the mind
with a wild confusion of mirth and melancholy.  The versification
of Rowe he thought too melodious for the stage, and too little
varied in different passions.  He made it the great fault of
Congreve, that all his persons were wits, and that he always
wrote with more art than nature.  He considered <i>Cato</i>
rather as a poem than a play, and allowed Addison to be the
complete master of allegory and grave humour, but paid no great
deference to him as a critick.  He thought the chief merit of
Prior was in his easy tales and lighter poems, tho' he allowed
that his <i>Solomon</i> had many noble sentiments elegantly
expressed.  In Swift he discovered an inimitable vein of irony,
and an easiness which all would hope and few would attain.  Pope
he was inclined to degrade from a poet to a versifier, and
thought his numbers rather luscious than sweet.  He often
lamented the neglect of <i>Phaedra and Hippolytus</i>, and wished
to see the stage under better regulations.
 
These assertions passed commonly uncontradicted; and if now and
then an opponent started up, he was quickly repressed by the
suffrages of the company, and Minim went away from every dispute
with elation of heart and increase of confidence.
 
He now grew conscious of his abilities, and began to talk of the
present state of dramatick poetry; wondered what was become of
the comick genius which supplied our ancestors with wit and
pleasantry, and why no writer could be found that durst now
venture beyond a farce.  He saw no reason for thinking that the vein
of humour was exhausted, since we live in a country where liberty
suffers every character to spread itself to its utmost bulk, and
which therefore produces more originals than all the rest of the
world together.  Of tragedy he concluded business to be the soul,
and yet often hinted that love predominates too much upon the
modern stage.
 
He was now an acknowledged critick, and had his own seat in the
coffee-house, and headed a party in the pit.  Minim has more
vanity than ill-nature, and seldom desires to do much mischief;
he will perhaps murmur a little in the ear of him that sits next
him, but endeavours to influence the audience to favour, by
clapping when an actor exclaims "ye Gods!" or laments the misery
of his country.
 
By degrees he was admitted to rehearsals, and many of his friends
are of opinion, that our present poets are indebted to him for
their happiest thoughts; by his contrivance the bell was rung
twice in <i>Barbarossa</i>, and by his persuasion the author of
<i>Cleone</i> concluded his play without a couplet; for what can
be more absurd, said Minim, than that part of a play should be
rhymed, and part written in blank verse? and by what acquisition
of faculties is the speaker who never could find rhymes before,
enabled to rhyme at the conclusion of an act!
 
He is the great investigator of hidden beauties, and is
particularly delighted when he finds "the sound an echo to the
sense."  He has read all our poets with particular attention to
this delicacy of versification, and wonders at the supineness
with which their works have been hitherto perused, so that no man
has found the sound of a drum in this distich,
 
     When pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,
     Was beat with fist instead of a stick;
 
and that the wonderful lines upon honour and a bubble have
hitherto passed without notice.
 
     Honour is like the glassy bubble
     Which costs philosophers such trouble,
     Where one part crack'd, the whole does fly,
     And wits are crack'd to find out why.
 
In these verses, says Minim, we have two striking accommodations
of the sound to the sense.  It is impossible to utter the two
lines emphatically without an act like that which they describe;
"bubble" and "trouble" causing a momentary inflation of the
cheeks by the retention of the breath, which is afterwards
forcibly emitted, as in the practice of "blowing bubbles."  But
the greatest excellence is in the third line, which is "crack'd"
in the middle to express a crack, and then shivers into
monosyllables.  Yet has [this] diamond lain neglected with common
stones, and among the innumerable admirers of <i>Hudibras</i> the
observation of this superlative passage has been reserved for the
sagacity of Minim.
.