ts of mental vision,
which may indeed assist our faculties when properly used, but produce
confusion and obscurity by unskilful application.

Some seem always to read with the microscope of criticism, and employ
their whole attention upon minute elegance, or faults scarcely visible
to common observation. The dissonance of a syllable, the recurrence of
the same sound, the repetition of a particle, the smallest deviation
from propriety, the slightest defect in construction or arrangement,
swell before their eyes into enormities. As they discern with great
exactness, they comprehend but a narrow compass, and know nothing of the
justness of the design, the general spirit of the performance, the
artifice of connection, or the harmony of the parts; they never,
conceive how small a proportion that which they are busy in
contemplating bears to the whole, or how the petty inaccuracies, with
which they are offended, are absorbed and lost in general excellence.

Others are furnished by criticism with a telescope. They see with great
clearness whatever is too remote to be discovered by the rest of
mankind, but are totally blind to all that lies immediately before them.
They discover in every passage some secret meaning, some remote
allusion, some artful allegory, or some occult imitation, which no other
reader ever suspected; but they have no perception of the cogency of
arguments, the force of pathetick sentiments, the various colours of
diction, or the flowery embellishments of fancy; of all that engages the
attention of others they are totally insensible, while they pry into
worlds of conjecture, and amuse themselves with phantoms in the clouds.

In criticism, as in every other art, we fail sometimes by our weakness,
but more frequently by our fault. We are sometimes bewildered by
ignorance, and sometimes by prejudice, but we seldom deviate far from
the right, but when we deliver ourselves up to the direction of vanity.

No. 177. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1751.

_Turpe est difficiles habere nugas_. MART. Lib. ii. Ep. lxxxvi. 9.

Those things which now seem frivolous and slight,
Will be of serious consequence to you,
When they have made you once ridiculous. ROSCOMMON.

TO THE RAMBLER.

SIR,

When I was, at the usual time, about to enter upon the profession to
which my friends had destined me, being summoned, by the death of my
father, into the country, I found myself master of an unexpected sum of
money, and of