But in this, as in every other respect, I have written fearlessly.  It is the misfortune of this age that its Writers, too thoughtless of immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or blame.  They write with the fear of Reviews before their eyes.  This system of criticism sprang up in that torpid interval when Poetry was not.  Poetry, and the art which professes to regulate and limit its powers, cannot subsist together.  Longinus could not have been the contemporary of Homer, nor Boileau of Horace.  Yet this species of criticism never presumed to assert an understanding of its own; it has always, unlike true science, followed, not preceded, the opinion of mankind, and would even now bribe with worthless adulation some of our greatest Poets to impose gratuitous fetters on their own imaginations, and become unconscious accomplices in the daily murder of all genius either not so aspiring or not so fortunate as their own.  I have sought therefore to write, as I believe that Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton wrote, with an utter disregard of anonymous censure.  I am certain that calumny and misrepresentation, though it may move me to compassion, cannot disturb my peace.  I shall understand the expressive silence of those sagacious enemies who dare not trust themselves to speak.  I shall endeavour to extract, from the midst of insult and contempt and maledictions, those admonitions which may tend to correct whatever imperfections such censurers may discover in this my first serious appeal to the Public.  If certain Critics were as clear-sighted as they are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their virulent writings!  As it is, I fear I shall be malicious enough to be amused with their paltry tricks and lame invectives.  Should the Public judge that my composition is worthless, I shall indeed bow before the tribunal from which Milton received his crown of immortality, and shall seek to gather, if I live, strength from that defeat, which may nerve me to some new enterprise of thought which may not be worthless.  I cannot conceive that Lucretius, when he meditated that poem whose doctrines are yet the basis of our metaphysical knowledge, and whose eloquence has been the wonder of mankind, wrote in awe of such censure as the hired sophists of the impure and superstitious noblemen of Rome might affix to what he should produce.  It was at the period when Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great.  These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that contempt for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and that faith in portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the imaginations of men, which, arising from the enslaved communities of the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its stream.  Were these the kind of men whose disapprobation the wise and lofty-minded Lucretius should have regarded with a salutary awe?  The latest and perhaps the meanest of those who follow in his footsteps would disdain to hold life on such conditions.