ge, as the author,
or if author of any, at least not of a considerable part of the poem.
That this was their sense of the matter, appears from their account of
the apology for the Rosciad, p. 409.

"This is another _Brutum Fulinen_ launched at the Critical Review by one
Churchill, who it seems is a clergyman, and it must be owned has a knack
at versification; a bard, who upon the strength of having written a few
good lines in a thing called _The Rosciad_, swaggers about as if he were
game-keeper of Parnassus."

P. 410. "This apologist has very little reason to throw out behind
against the Critical Reviewers, who in mentioning _The Rosciad_, of
which he calls himself author, commended it in the lump, without
specifying the bald lines, the false thoughts, and tinsel frippery from
which it is not entirely free." They conclude with contrasting him with
Smollet, in comparison of whom he is "a puny antagonist, who must write
many more poems as good as the Rosciad, before he will be considered as
a respectable enemy."

Upon these extracts I will beg leave to make two observations.

1. Abstracted from all consideration of the profundity of criticism that
is displayed, no man can avoid being struck with the humour and
pleasantry in which they are conceived, or the elegant and gentlemanlike
language in which they are couched. What can be more natural or more
ingenuous than to suppose that the persons principally commended in a
work, were themselves the writers of it? And for that allusion of the
Scotch pedlars, for my part, I hold it to be inimitable.

2. But what is most admirable is the independent spirit, with which they
stemmed the torrent of fashion, and forestalled the second thoughts of
their countrymen. There was a time when Tristram Shandy was applauded,
and Churchill thought another Dryden. But who reads Tristram now? There
prevails indeed a certain quaintness, and something "like an affectation
of being immoderately witty, throughout the whole work." But for real
humour not a grain. So said the Monthly Reviewers, (v. 21. p. 568.) and
so says the immortal Knox. Both indeed grant him a slight knack at the
pathetic; but, if I may venture a prediction, his pretensions to the
latter will one day appear no better founded, than his pretentions to
the former.

And then poor Churchill! His satire now appears to be dull and
pointless. Through his tedious page no modern student can labour. We
look back, and wonder how the