After entering into a copious (about 20 pages) and what they seem to think a learned investigation of my great friend’s theory and sentiments, they have dared to refute his reasoning, and turn it to ridicule.
These presumptuous writers finally close their unreasonable account of Dr Haygarth, in quotations from Dr Caldwell, who, it appears, is a fellow of the college of physicians of Philadelphia, and a very ungentleman-like fellow too, for he has also had the rashness to descant on some of the works of Dr Haygarth in terms following.
“Perhaps he (Dr Haygarth) may found the boldness of his pretensions as an author on the maturity of his years. Many writers less youthful are more modest; and it is to be lamented that grey hairs give no infallible earnest of either wisdom or liberality. We will not positively assert that he is not a man of profound erudition; but we have no reason whatever to convince us that he is. Perhaps he may pride himself on being a native of the same country which produced a Harvey, a Sydenham, a Cullen, and a Hunter. We entreat him to remember, that weeds may infest the same ground which has been overshadowed by the lordly adansonia, and that the same clime gives birth to the lion and the jackal.” Medical Repository, vol. v. p. 333. Oh, fie! fie!
Till our aerial cutter runs.
My mode of commencing an airy tour, mounted, Muse and Co. on a poetical pony, which, by the way, is metamorphosed into a cutter, may, perhaps, be objected to by your fastidious critics, as a liberty even beyond a poet’s licentiousness. But there is nothing which we men of genius more thoroughly detest than any attempt to fetter our faculties with the frigid rules of criticism. Besides, sense or nonsense, poetry or gingling, it is perfectly Della Cruscan.
“A Wilderness of suns!”
This “proud” passage, together with “O thou!”—“GENIUS or MUSE!”—and “CATARACT OF LIGHT!”—are the legitimate offspring of that prince of poets, who rose to such a towering pitch of poetry,
“That oft Hibernian optics bright