themselves, never fail to raise a smile, if not immediately at the
expense of the Author, yet entirely destructive of that frame of mind
which his Poem requires in order to be relished.

I have dwelt the longer on this branch of Literature, because you are
chiefly to look here for materials of fun and irony.

Voyages and Travels indeed are no barren ground; and you must seldom let
a Number of your _Review_ go abroad without an Article of this
description. The charm of this species of writing, so universally felt,
arises chiefly from its uniting Narrative with Information. The interest
we take in the story can only be kept alive by minute incident and
occasional detail; which puts us in possession of the traveller's
feelings, his hopes, his fears, his disappointments, and his pleasures.
At the same time the thirst for knowledge and love of novelty is
gratified by continual information respecting the people and countries he
visits.

If you wish therefore to run down the book, you have only to play off
these two parts against each other. When the Writer's object is to
satisfy the first inclination, you are to thank him for communicating to
the World such valuable facts as, whether he lost his way in the night,
or sprained his ankle, or had no appetite for his dinner. If he is busied
about describing the Mineralogy, Natural History, Agriculture, Trade, etc.
of a country: you may mention a hundred books from whence the same
information may be obtained; and deprecate the practice of emptying old
musty Folios into new Quartos, to gratify that sickly taste for a
smattering about everything which distinguishes the present Age.

In Works of Science and recondite Learning, the task you have undertaken
will not be so difficult as you may imagine. Tables of Contents and
Indexes are blessed helps in the hands of a Reviewer; but, more than all,
the Preface is the field from which his richest harvest is to be gathered.

In the Preface, the Author usually gives a summary of what has been
written on the same subject before; he acknowledges the assistance he has
received from different sources, and the reasons of his dissent from
former Writers; he confesses that certain parts have been less
attentively considered than others, and that information has come to his
hands too late to be made use of; he points out many things in the
composition of his Work which he thinks may provoke animadversion, and
endeavours to defend or palliate h