Spence's "anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men"

IN the month of June 1726 there appeared. At Oxford and in London a small volume of criticism upon an important translation then recently published. The critic was Joseph Spence, a young clergyman, and Fellow of New College, Oxford: the book criticised was a no less important work than Pope's translation of the Odyssey; and the criticism, which took the not altogether unusual form of a dialogue, was entitled an Essay on Pope's Odyssey.1 In itself, this essay is not a very notable performance, although its fairness and candour were considerably in advance of the criticism of the day. The writer was too much a gentleman to stoop to the petty vilification and abuse then popular among critics, while his keen poetic sense would not allow him to pass unreproved those faults which were, as a rule, lost sight of in the enthu siasm of adulation. His criticism, says Dr. Johnson.

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