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MS untraced; text is taken from Athenæum, A Magazine of Literary and Miscellaneous Information, 3:13 (January 1808). Previously published: Athenæum, A Magazine of Literary and Miscellaneous Information, 3:13 (January 1808), pp. 1–2.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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CRITICAL MISREPRESENTATION.
To the Editor of the Athenæum.
YOU have with much propriety declared, that the complaints of offended authors against their critics cannot be inserted in the Athenæum; it is not the place for them. Every critical journal ought to be open to such replies, under obvious restrictions; and if admittance were refused to a fair defence in one, it should be granted in another. Such a regulation would be some check upon the licentiousness of reviewers; as it is now, their gross ignorance and their wilful misrepresentations pass current, and do their work of malice, because there is no place in which they can be exposed. It will not be supposed that this censure of reviewers is meant to be general and indiscriminating; but it cannot be denied, that every existing journal furnishes some proofs of its truth.
Notwithstanding your prohibition, I presume that you will permit an error in literary history to be set right,
wherefrom-ever it may occur. It is said in a late number of the Critical Review, that Mr. Hole’s Arthur ‘failed of success,
because published at the same time with the Joans of Arc, Alfreds, and Cœur de Lions, which disgusted the
world within the very name Epic.’
Mr. Holes Arthur failed of success because it did not deserve it. The poem had fair play; it appeared before
reviews were converted into tools of party, and before the butchers’ phrase, ‘cutting up,’ was supposed to be synonymous with
criticising. The journals gave it at least as much praise as it deserved, and it failed in spite of them, as the Epigoniad
The world has, perhaps, been ‘disgusted with the very name of epic.’