against a party so potent and so terrible as the critics of those
ages were, whose very voice was so dreadful that a legion of authors
would tremble and drop their pens at the sound. For so Herodotus
tells us expressly in another place how a vast army of Scythians was
put to flight in a panic terror by the braying of an ass. From
hence it is conjectured by certain profound philologers, that the
great awe and reverence paid to a true critic by the writers of
Britain have been derived to us from those our Scythian ancestors.
In short, this dread was so universal, that in process of time those
authors who had a mind to publish their sentiments more freely in
describing the true critics of their several ages, were forced to
leave off the use of the former hieroglyph as too nearly approaching
the prototype, and invented other terms instead thereof that were
more cautious and mystical. So Diodorus, speaking to the same
purpose, ventures no farther than to say that in the mountains of
Helicon there grows a certain weed which bears a flower of so damned
a scent as to poison those who offer to smell it. Lucretius gives
exactly the same relation.


"Est etiam in magnis Heliconis montibus arbos,
Floris odore hominem retro consueta necare."--Lib. 6. {86}


But Ctesias, whom we lately quoted, has been a great deal bolder; he
had been used with much severity by the true critics of his own age,
and therefore could not forbear to leave behind him at least one
deep mark of his vengeance against the whole tribe. His meaning is
so near the surface that I wonder how it possibly came to be
overlooked by those who deny the antiquity of the true critics. For