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evil tongues. For it hath been objected that those ancient heroes,
famous for their combating so many giants, and dragons, and robbers,
were in their own persons a greater nuisance to mankind than any of
those monsters they subdued; and therefore, to render their
obligations more complete, when all other vermin were destroyed,
should in conscience have concluded with the same justice upon
themselves, as Hercules most generously did, and hath upon that
score procured for himself more temples and votaries than the best
of his fellows. For these reasons I suppose it is why some have
conceived it would be very expedient for the public good of learning
that every true critic, as soon as he had finished his task
assigned, should immediately deliver himself up to ratsbane or hemp,
or from some convenient altitude, and that no man's pretensions to
so illustrious a character should by any means be received before
that operation was performed.

Now, from this heavenly descent of criticism, and the close analogy
it bears to heroic virtue, it is easy to assign the proper
employment of a true, ancient, genuine critic: which is, to travel
through this vast world of writings; to peruse and hunt those
monstrous faults bred within them; to drag out the lurking errors,
like Cacus from his den; to multiply them like Hydra's heads; and
rake them together like Augeas's dung; or else to drive away a sort
of dangerous fowl who have a perverse inclination to plunder the
best branches of the tree of knowledge, like those Stymphalian birds
that ate up the fruit.

These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a
true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers'
faults; which may be further put beyond dispute by the following
demonstration:- That whoever will examine the writings in all kinds
wherewith this ancient sect hath honoured the world, shall
immediately find from the whole thread and tenor of them that the
ideas of the authors have been altogether conversant and taken up
with the faults, and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of
other writers, and let the subject treated on be whatever it will,
their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the
defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad
does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole
appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms
themselves have made.

Having thus briefly considered the original and office of a critic,
as the word is understood in its most noble and universal
acceptation, I proceed to refute the objections of those who argue
from the silence and pretermission of authors, by which they pretend
to prove that the very art of criticism, as now exercised, and by me

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