Note 232 — AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM.
Reading edition
The author has omitted two lines which stood here as containing a national reflection, which in his stricter judgment he could not but disapprove, on any people whatever.—Pope.
The cancelled couplet was as follows:
Then first the Belgian morals were extolled, We their religion had, and they our gold.
This sneer was dictated by the poet's dislike to William III. and the Dutch, for displacing the popish king James II.—Croker.
This ingenious and religious author seems to have had two particular antipathies—one to grammatical and verbal criticism, the other to false doctrine and heresy. To the first we may ascribe his treating Bentley, Burman, Kuster, and Wasse with a contempt which recoiled upon himself. To the second we will impute his pious zeal against those divines of king William, whom he supposed to be infected with the infidel, or the socinian, or the latitudinarian spirit, and not so orthodox as himself, and his friends Swift, Bolingbroke, etc. Thus he laid about him, and censured men of whose literary, or of whose theological merits or defects, he was no more a judge than his footman John Searle.—Dr. Jortin.