" 'Tis with our judgments, as our watches; none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own."

Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and
illustrations in the Essay; the critical rules laid down are too much
those of a school, and of a confined one. There is one passage in the
Essay on Criticism in which the author speaks with that eloquent
enthusiasm of the fame of ancient writers, which those will always feel
who have themselves any hope or chance of immortality. I have quoted the
passage elsewhere, but I will repeat it here.

"Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days,
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow."

These lines come with double force and beauty on the reader, as they
were dictated by the writer's despair of ever attaining that lasting
glory which he celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm in others,
from the lateness of the age in which he lived, and from his writing in
a tongue, not understood by other nations, and that grows obsolete and
unintelligible to ourselves at the end of every second century. But he
needed not have thus antedated his own poetical doom--the loss and
entire oblivion of that which can never die. If he had known, he might
have boasted that "his little bark" wafted down the stream of time,