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also speaks eloquently to the contrary.
The minutiae of verbal criticism I am far from seeking to despise. Indeed,
considering the character of some of my own books, such an attempt would
be gross inconsistency. But, while I appreciate its importance in a
philological view, I am inclined to set little store on its aesthetic
value, especially in poetry. Three parts of the emendations made upon
poets are mere alterations, some of which, had they been suggested to the
author by his Maecenas or Africanus, he would probably have adopted.
Moreover, those who are most exact in laying down rules of verbal
criticism and interpretation, are often least competent to carry out their
own precepts. Grammarians are not poets by profession, but may be so per
accidens. I do not at this moment remember two emendations on Homer,
calculated to substantially improve the poetry of a passage, although a
mass of remarks, from Herodotus down to Loewe, have given us the history
of a thousand minute points, without which our Greek knowledge would be
gloomy and jejune.
But it is not on words only that grammarians, mere grammarians, will
exercise their elaborate and often tiresome ingenuity. Binding down an
heroic or dramatic poet to the block upon which they have previously
dissected his words and sentences, they proceed to use the axe and the
pruning knife by wholesale, and inconsistent in everything but their wish
to make out a case of unlawful affiliation, they cut out book after book,
passage after passage, till the author is reduced to a collection of
fragments, or till those, who fancied they possessed the works of some
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