from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps
more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in
which to embody them.

I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided
I find him always arguing on one side of the question. The
controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a
favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of
great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and
critical opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other,
instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither
bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel,
such as I will remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up
in the rag-fair finery of,

------thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--

I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the
component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative
dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which