given us a comprehensive list of them {84a}. Besides, they have
proved beyond contradiction that the very finest things delivered of
old have been long since invented and brought to light by much later
pens, and that the noblest discoveries those ancients ever made in
art or nature have all been produced by the transcending genius of
the present age, which clearly shows how little merit those ancients
can justly pretend to, and takes off that blind admiration paid them
by men in a corner, who have the unhappiness of conversing too
little with present things. Reflecting maturely upon all this, and
taking in the whole compass of human nature, I easily concluded that
these ancients, highly sensible of their many imperfections, must
needs have endeavoured, from some passages in their works, to
obviate, soften, or divert the censorious reader, by satire or
panegyric upon the true critics, in imitation of their masters, the
moderns. Now, in the commonplaces {84b} of both these I was
plentifully instructed by a long course of useful study in prefaces
and prologues, and therefore immediately resolved to try what I
could discover of either, by a diligent perusal of the most ancient
writers, and especially those who treated of the earliest times.

Here I found, to my great surprise, that although they all entered
upon occasion into particular descriptions of the true critic,
according as they were governed by their fears or their hopes, yet
whatever they touched of that kind was with abundance of caution,
adventuring no further than mythology and hieroglyphic. This, I
suppose, gave ground to superficial readers for urging the silence
of authors against the antiquity of the true critic, though the
types are so apposite, and the applications so necessary and
natural, that it is not easy to conceive how any reader of modern
eye and taste could overlook them. I shall venture from a great