don,
that I was assured by several that the Duke of MARLBOROUGH was a
coward, and Mr. POPE a fool."

A foreigner indeed could hardly expect that in collecting the
characters of English authors by English authors (a labour which has
long afforded me pleasure often interrupted by indignation)--in a
word, that a class of literary history should turn out a collection of
personal quarrels. Would not this modern Baillet, in his new _Jugemens
des Scavans_, so ingeniously inquisitive but so infinitely confused,
require to be initiated into the mysteries of that spirit of party
peculiar to our free country!

All that boiling rancour which sputters against the thoughts, the
style, the taste, the moral character of an author, is often nothing
more than practising what, to give it a name, we may call _Political
Criticism in Literature_; where an author's literary character is
attacked solely from the accidental circumstance of his differing in
opinion from his critics on subjects unconnected with the topics he
treats of.

Could Anthony Wood, had he not been influenced by this political
criticism, have sent down LOCKE to us as "a man of a turbulent spirit,
clamorous, and never contented, prating and troublesome?"[338] But
Locke was the antagonist of FILMER, that advocate of arbitrary power;
and Locke is described "as bred under a fanatical tutor," and when in
Holland, as one of those who under the Earl of Shaftesbury "stuck
close to him when discarded, and carried on the _trade of faction_
beyond and within the seas several years after." In the great original
genius, born, like BACON and NEWTON, to create a new era in the
history of the human mind, this political literary critic, who was not
always deficient in his perceptions of genius, could only discover "a
trader in faction," though in his honesty he acknowledges him to be "a
noted writer."

A more illustrious instance of party-spirit operating against works of
genius is presented to us in the awful character of MILTON. From
earliest youth to latest age endowed with all the characteristics of
genius; fervent with all the inspirations of study; in all changes
still the same great literary character as Velleius Paterculus writes
of one of his heroes--"Aliquando fortuna, semper animo maximus:" while
in his own day, foreigners, who usually anticipate posterity, were
inquiring after Milton, it is known how utterly disregarded he lived
at home. The divine author of the "Paradise