Note 266 — AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM. (continued 2)
Reading edition
This dissolute and effeminate writer little deserved a place among good critics for only two or three pages on the subject of criticism.—Warton.
It is to be suspected that Pope had never read Petronius, and mentioned him on the credit of two or three sentences which he had often seen quoted, imagining that where there was so much, there must necessarily be more. Young men, in haste to be renowned, too frequently talk of books which they have scarcely seen.—Johnson.
If Pope had been acquainted with the general tenor of the fragments which remain of Petronius, he would not have celebrated the most corrupt and disgusting writer of antiquity for an unalloyed combination of charming qualities.