Worst fares it with authors when minds of this cast become the arbiters of public opinion; for the greatest of writers may unquestionably be forced into ridiculous attitudes by the well-known artifices practised by modern criticism.  The elephant, no longer in his forest struggling with his hunters, but falling entrapped by a paltry snare, comes at length, in the height of ill-fortune, to dance on heated iron at the bidding of the pantaloon of a fair.  Whatever such critics may plead to mortify the vanity of authors, at least it requires as much vanity to give effect to their own polished effrontery.[B] Scorn, sarcasm, and invective, the egotism of the vain, and the irascibility of the petulant, where they succeed in debilitating genius of the consciousness of its powers, are practising the witchery of that ancient superstition of “tying the knot,” which threw the youthful bridegroom into utter despair by its ideal forcefulness.[C]

[Footnote A:  It has been suspected that Adrian VI. has been calumniated, for that this pontiff was only too sudden to begin the reform he meditated.  But Adrian VI. was a scholastic whose austerity turned away with contempt from all ancient art, and was no brother to contemporary genius.  He was one of the cui bono race, a branch of our political economists.  When they showed him the Laocooen, Adrian silenced their raptures by the frigid observation, that all such things were idola antiquorum:  and ridiculed the amena letteratura till every man of genius retreated from his court.  Had Adrian’s reign extended beyond its brief period, men of taste in their panic imagined that in his zeal the Pontiff would have calcined the fine statues of ancient art, to expedite the edifice of St. Peter.]

[Footnote B:  Listen to a confession and a recantation of an illustrious sinner; the Coryphaeus of the amusing and new-found art, or artifice, of modern criticism.  In the character of BURNS, the Edinburgh Reviewer, with his peculiar felicity of manner, attacked the character of the man of genius; but when Mr. Campbell vindicated his immortal brother with all the inspiration of the family feeling, our critic, who is one of those great artists who acquire at length the utmost indifference even for their own works, generously avowed that, “a certain tone of exaggeration is incidental we fear to the sort of writing in which we are engaged.  Reckoning a little too much on the dulness of our readers, we are often led to overstate our sentiments:  when a little controversial warmth is added to a little love of effect, an excess of colouring steals over the canvas, which ultimately offends no eye so much as our own.”  But what if this love of effect in the critic has been too often obtained at the entire cost of the literary characters, the fruits of whose studious days at this moment lie withering in oblivion, or whose genius the critic has deterred from pursuing the career it had opened for itself!  To have silenced the learned, and to have terrified the modest, is the barbarous triumph of a Hun or a Vandal; and the vaunted freedom of the literary republic departed from us when the vacillating public blindly consecrated the edicts of the demagogues of literature, whoever they may be.