THR BRITISH CRITIC, FOR JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER, MDCCCXI. Impatiens animus, nec adhuc tractabilis arte, PRINTED FOR F. C. AND J. RIVINGTON, By Law and Gilbert, St. John's Square, Clerkenwell. PREFACE. F a Review were confidered as a Lottery, it is would reverse the order of blanks and prizes; and the wheel would be accounted rich, not when it contained a recommendation of many works of learning, elegance, or utility; but when it was well fupplied with books of which the authors were clearly proved to have wafted their time, and their publifhers and purchasers, their money. Those are the prizes for which modern candour is willing to buy into the Literary Lottery; in which it feeks, not the means of improvement, but the food for ridicule: not to know from what authors it may gain. inftruction, but how many it may hold in contempt. As if, when the Critic had beaten out a poor writer's brains, it was the fame as giving an equal quantity to the reader; who feels a conscious fuperiority over every author he is taught to laugh at. It is in direct defiance of this newly-established taste, that we continue to draw up our half yearly prefaces, from which all fuch prizes are by their very plan excluded; and in which the reader is taught nothing more interefting than where to find wifdom, and how to purchase improvement or rational amufement. Perverse as it is, we cannot yet be convinced that it is not patriotic, and fhall therefore, for the prefent, proceed as ufual. |