Note 297 — THE COMMENTARY AND NOTES OF W. WARBURTON ON THE ESSAY ON CRITICISM.

Warburton's remarks on the quotation from Addison's paper in the Spectator, originally ran thus: "Whereas nothing can be more unlike, in this respect, than these two poems—the Essay on Criticism having, as we shall show, all the regularity that method can demand, and the Art of Poetry all the looseness and inconnection that a familiar conversation would indulge. Neither, were it otherwise, would this excellent author's observation excuse our poet, who, writing in the formal way of a discourse, was obliged to observe the method of such compositions, while Horace in an easy epistle needed no apology for want of it. For it is the nature of the composition that makes method proper or unnecessary." The passage was altered out of compliment to the commentary of his friend Hurd on the Art of Poetry, and Warburton, who had previously contended that method was needless in Horace, now maintained that there was no "prerogative in verse to dispense with regularity." It was common with him to regulate his critical opinions by his personal partialities or aversions.