events, an injustice. He who tells me that there are defects in a new
work, tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted
without his information. But he, who points out and elucidates the
beauties of an original work does indeed give me interesting
information, such as experience would not have authorized me in
anticipating. And as to compositions which the authors themselves
announce with

Haec ipsi novimus esse nihil,

why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only
because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What
literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to
let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am
not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from
the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of Swift
and his correspondents, in hours of languor, when to have read his
more finished works would have been useless to myself, and, in some
sort, an act of injustice to the author. But I am at a loss to
conceive by what perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his
genius could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of
Gulliver, or the Tale of a Tub. Had Mr. Southey written twice as many
poems of inferior merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the
journals of the day, they would have added to his honour with good and
wise men, not merely or principally as proving the versatility of his
talents, but as evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in
its levities never dictated a line which it need regret on any moral
account.

I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the duty of