Christian: sometimes we meet Mistrust and Timorous; sometimes Mr
Hate-good and Mr Love-lust; and then again Prudence, Piety and
Charity.

That critical discernment is not sufficient to make men poets, is
generally allowed. Why it should keep them from becoming poets,
is not perhaps equally evident; but the fact is, that poetry
requires not an examining but a believing frame of mind. Those
feel it most, and write it best, who forget that it is a work of
art; to whom its imitations, like the realities from which they
are taken, are subjects, not for connoisseurship, but for tears
and laughter, resentment and affection; who are too much under
the influence of the illusion to admire the genius which has
produced it; who are too much frightened for Ulysses in the cave
of Polyphemus to care whether the pun about Outis be good or bad;
who forget that such a person as Shakspeare ever existed, while
they weep and curse with Lear. It is by giving faith to the
creations of the imagination that a man becomes a poet. It is by
treating those creations as deceptions, and by resolving them, as
nearly as possible, into their elements, that he becomes a
critic. In the moment in which the skill of the artist is
perceived, the spell of the art is broken.

These considerations account for the absurdities into which the
greatest writers have fallen, when they have attempted to give
general rules for composition, or to pronounce judgment on the
works of others. They are unaccustomed to analyse what they
feel; they, therefore, perpetually refer their emotions to causes
which have not in the slightest degree tended to produce them.
They feel pleasure in reading a book. They never consider that