Walpole's pride and
hauteur were excessive; which betrayed themselves in the
treatment of Gray who had himself too much pride and
spirit _to forgive it_ when matters were made up between them,
and Walpole invited Gray to Strawberry-hill. When Gray came,
he, without any ceremony, told Walpole that though he
waited on him as civility required, yet by _no means would he
ever be there on the terms of their former friendship,
which he had totally cancelled_.--From COLE'S MSS.

INFLUENCE OF A BAD TEMPER IN CRITICISM.

Unfriendly to the literary character, some have imputed the
brutality of certain authors to their literary habits, when it may
be more truly said that they derived their literature from their
brutality. The spirit was envenomed before it entered into the
fierceness of literary controversy, and the insanity was in the
evil temper of the man before he roused our notice by his ravings.
RITSON, the late antiquary of poetry (not to call him poetical),
amazed the world by his vituperative railing at two authors of the
finest taste in poetry, Warton and Percy; he carried criticism, as
the discerning few had first surmised, to insanity itself; the
character before us only approached it.

DENNIS attained to the ambiguous honour of being distinguished as
"The Critic," and he may yet instruct us how the moral influences the
literary character, and how a certain talent that can never mature
itself into genius, like the pale fruit that hangs in the shade,
ripens only into sourness.

As a critic in his own day, party for some time kept him alive; the
art of criticism was a novelty at that period of our literature. He
flattered some great men, and he abused three of the greatest; this
was one mode of securing popularity; because, by this contrivance, he
divided the town into two parties; and the irascibility and satire of
Pope and Swift were not less serviceable to him than the partial
panegyrics of Dryden and Congreve. Johnson revived him, for his minute
attack on Addison; and Kippis, feebly voluminous, and with the cold
affectation of candour, allows him to occupy a place in our literary
history too large in the eye of Truth and Taste.

Let us say all the good we can of him, that we may not be interrupted
in a more important inquiry. Dennis once urged fair pretensions to the
office of critic. Some of his "Original Letters," and particularly the
"