treatment than he deserved. His name was so long used to point
every epigram upon dull writers, that it became at last a byword of
contempt but it deserves observation, that malignity takes hold only
of his writings, and that his life passed without reproach, even
when his boldness of reprehension naturally turned upon him many
eyes desirous to espy faults which many tongues would have made
haste to publish. But those who could not blame, could, at least,
forbear to praise, and therefore of his private life and domestic
character there are no memorials.

As an author, he may justly claim the honours of magnanimity. The
incessant attacks of his enemies, whether serious or merry, are
never discovered to have disturbed his quiet, or to have lessened
his confidence in himself: they neither awed him to silence nor to
caution: they neither provoked him to petulance, nor depressed him
to complaint. While the distributors of literary fame were
endeavouring to depreciate and degrade him, he either despised or
defied them, wrote on as he had written before, and never turned
aside to quiet them by civility, or repress them by confutation. He
depended with great security on his own powers, and perhaps was for
that reason less diligent in perusing books. His literature was, I
think, but small. What he knew of antiquity, I suspect him to have
gathered from modern compilers; but, though he could not boast of
much critical knowledge, his mind was stored with general
principles, and he left minute researches to those whom he
considered as little minds. With this disposition he wrote most of
his poems. Having formed a magnificent design, he was careless of
particular and subordinate elegances; he studied no niceties of
versification; he waited for no felicities of fancy, but caught his
first thoughts in the first words in which they were presented; nor