its explanation.

Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few
pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the
extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been
popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible,
the excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy
me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad!

Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have
before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited
and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From
my first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals,
lived either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects
of national interest, published at different times, first in the
Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on
the principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and Milton,
constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could
offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary
exception in which my words were first misstated and then wantonly
applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the
displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced
my intention to give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits
and defects of English poetry in its different aeras; first, from
Chaucer to Milton; second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and
third, from Cowper to the present day; I changed my plan, and confined
my disquisition to the former two periods, that I might furnish no
possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant
to misapply my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to