Note 593 — Chapter I · FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.

Spence (whose Anecdotes were printed partly by Malone, and completely by Singer in 1820, reprinted from the latter edition in 1858, and re-selected by Mr Underhill (London, n. d.) in the last decade of the nineteenth century) has sometimes received praise as a critic himself. His Polymetis usefully brought together classical art and letters, and the Anecdotes themselves are not without taste. But his elaborate criticism of Pope’s Odyssey, published in 1726, is of little value, neither praising nor blaming its subject for the right things, and characterised as a whole by a pottering and peddling kind of censorship.