overlook faults for the sake of greater beauties--one of the distinct
marks of the new criticism to which the _Remarks_ belongs.

The essay starts out in a boldly challenging tone. Criticism, says the
author, has been badly abused: it has been regarded as an excuse for the
ill-natured to find fault or for the better-natured to eulogize. But
true criticism has for its end "to set in the best light all Beauties,
and to touch upon Defects no more than is necessary." Beyond this it
seeks to set up a right taste for the age. His own purpose is to examine
a great tragedy "according to the Rules of Reason and Nature, without
having any regard to those Rules established by arbitrary Dogmatizing
Critics ..." More specifically, he proposes to show the why of our
pleasure in this piece: "And as to those things which charm by a certain
secret Force, and strike us we know not how, or why; I believe it will
not be disagreeable, if I shew to everyone the Reason why they are
pleas'd ..." This, it need hardly be observed, is all pretty much in
the vein of Addison, whom the author extols and whose papers on
_Paradise Lost_, he tells us, have furnished a model for the present
undertaking. Throughout his criticism Addison had deprecated mere
fault-finding and had urged the positive approach of emphasis on
beauties. In the last twelve essays on Milton's poem he had shown a new
way in critical writing, the way of particular as opposed to general
criticism, with the selection of specific details for praise and
explication; in his essay on the Imagination he had sought to find a
rationale for that kind of criticism: in which a man of true taste,
going beyond the mechanical rules, "would enter into the very Spirit and
Soul of Fine Writing, and shew us the several Sources of that Pleasure
which rises in the Mind upon the Perusal of a Noble Work." With such
ideas in mind, Anonymous proceeds to study _Hamlet_, in what is probably
the first act-by-act, scene-by-scene analysis of a play in English,