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question beyond doubt.
It well deserves considering that these ancient writers, in treating
enigmatically upon this subject, have generally fixed upon the very
same hieroglyph, varying only the story according to their
affections or their wit. For first, Pausanias is of opinion that
the perfection of writing correct was entirely owing to the
institution of critics, and that he can possibly mean no other than
the true critic is, I think, manifest enough from the following
description. He says they were a race of men who delighted to
nibble at the superfluities and excrescences of books, which the
learned at length observing, took warning of their own accord to lop
the luxuriant, the rotten, the dead, the sapless, and the overgrown
branches from their works. But now all this he cunningly shades
under the following allegory: That the Nauplians in Argia learned
the art of pruning their vines by observing that when an ass had
browsed upon one of them, it thrived the better and bore fairer
fruit. But Herodotus holding the very same hieroglyph, speaks much
plainer and almost in terminis. He hath been so bold as to tax the
true critics of ignorance and malice, telling us openly, for I think
nothing can be plainer, that in the western part of Libya there were
asses with horns, upon which relation Ctesias {85} yet refines,
mentioning the very same animal about India; adding, that whereas
all other asses wanted a gall, these horned ones were so redundant
in that part that their flesh was not to be eaten because of its
extreme bitterness.
Now, the reason why those ancient writers treated this subject only
by types and figures was because they durst not make open attacks
against a party so potent and so terrible as the critics of those
ages were, whose very voice was so dreadful that a legion of authors
would tremble and drop their pens at the sound. For so Herodotus
tells us expressly in another place how a vast army of Scythians was
put to flight in a panic terror by the braying of an ass. From
hence it is conjectured by certain profound philologers, that the
great awe and reverence paid to a true critic by the writers of
Britain have been derived to us from those our Scythian ancestors.
In short, this dread was so universal, that in process of time those
authors who had a mind to publish their sentiments more freely in
describing the true critics of their several ages, were forced to
leave off the use of the former hieroglyph as too nearly approaching
the prototype, and invented other terms instead thereof that were
more cautious and mystical. So Diodorus, speaking to the same
purpose, ventures no farther than to say that in the mountains of
Helicon there grows a certain weed which bears a flower of so damned
a scent as to poison those who offer to smell it.
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