When you have reconciled yourself to this liberal way of thinking; you will find many inferior advantages resulting from it, which at first did not enter into your consideration.  In particular, it will greatly lighten your labours, to follow the public taste, instead of taking upon you to direct it.  The task of Pleasing is at all times easier than that of Instructing:  at least it does not stand in need of painful research and preparation; and may be effected in general by a little vivacity of manner, and a dexterous morigeration [compliance, or obsequiousness], as Lord BACON calls it, to the humours and frailties of men.  Your responsibility too is thereby much lessened.  Justice and Candour can only be required of you so far as they coincide with this Main Principle:  and a little experience will convince you that these are not the happiest means of accomplishing your purpose.

It has been idly said, That a Reviewer acts in a judicial capacity, and that his conduct should be regulated by the same rules by which the Judge of a Civil Court is governed:  that he should rid himself of every bias; be patient, cautious, sedate, and rigidly impartial; that he should not seek to shew off himself, and should check every disposition to enter into the case as a partizan.

Such is the language of superficial thinkers; but in reality there is no analogy between the two cases.  A Judge is promoted to that office by the authority of the State; a Reviewer by his own.  The former is independent of control, and may therefore freely follow the dictates of his own conscience:  the latter depends for his very bread upon the breath of public opinion; the great law of self-preservation therefore points out to him a different line of action.  Besides, as we have already observed, if he ceases to please, he is no longer read; and consequently is no longer useful.  In a Court of Justice, too, the part of amusing the bystanders rests with the Counsel:  in the case of criticism, if the Reviewer himself does not undertake it, who will?

Instead of vainly aspiring to the gravity of a Magistrate; I would advise him, when he sits down to write, to place himself in the imaginary situation of a cross-examining Pleader.  He may comment, in a vein of agreeable irony, upon the profession, the manner of life, the look, dress, or even the name, of the witness he is examining:  when he has raised a contemptuous opinion of him in the minds of the Court, he may proceed to draw answers from him capable of a ludicrous turn; and he may carve and garble these to his own liking.

This mode of proceeding you will find most practicable in Poetry, where the boldness of the image or the delicacy of thought (for which the Reader’s mind was prepared in the original) will easily be made to appear extravagant, or affected, if judiciously singled out, and detached from the group to which it belongs.  Again, since much depends upon the rhythm and the terseness of expression (both of which are sometimes destroyed by dropping a single word, or transposing a phrase), I have known much advantage arise from not quoting in the form of a literal extract:  but giving a brief summary in prose, of the contents of a poetical passage; and interlarding your own language, with occasional phrases of the Poem marked with inverted commas.