Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/156

104 altitude; and that no man's pretensions to so illustrious a character, should by any means be received, before that operation were performed.

Now, from this heavenly descent of criticism, and the close analogy it bears to heroick virtue, it is easy to assign the proper employment of a true ancient genuine critick; which is, to travel through this vast world of writings; to pursue and hunt those monstrous faults bred within them; to drag out the lurking errours, like Cacus from his den; to multiply them like Hydra's heads; and rake them together like Augeas's dung: or else drive away a sort of dangerous fowl, who have a perverse inclination to plunder the best branches of the tree of knowledge, like those stymphalian birds that eat up the fruit.

These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critick: that he is discoverer and collector of writers faults; which may be farther put beyond dispute by the following demonstration: that whoever will examine the writings in all kinds, wherewith this ancient sect has honoured the world, shall immediately find, from the whole thread and tenour of them, that the ideas of the authors, have been altogether conversant and taken up, with the faults, and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers: and, let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so intirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad, does of necessity distil into their own; by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms, themselves have made. Having