Very elaborate criticisms have been formed by eminent writers, in which great learning and acute logic have only betrayed the absence of the AEsthetic faculty. Warburton called Addison an empty superficial writer, destitute himself of an atom of Addison's taste for the beautiful; and Johnson is a flagrant instance that great powers of reasoning are more fatal to the works of imagination than had ever been suspected. By one of these learned critics was Montaigne, the venerable father of modern Miscellanies, called "a bold ignorant fellow." To thinking readers, this critical summary will appear mysterious; for Montaigne had imbibed the spirit of all the moral writers of antiquity; and although he has made a capricious complaint of a defective memory, we cannot but wish the complaint had been more real; for we discover in his works such a gathering of knowledge that it seems at times to stifle his own energies. Montaigne was censured by Scaliger, as Addison was censured by Warburton; because both, like Socrates, smiled at that mere erudition which consists of knowing the thoughts of others and having no thoughts of our own. To weigh syllables, and to arrange dates, to adjust texts, and to heap annotations, has generally proved the absence of the higher faculties. When a more adventurous spirit of this herd attempts some novel discovery, often men of taste behold, with indignation, the perversions of their understanding; and a Bentley in his Milton, or a Warburton on a Virgil, had either a singular imbecility concealed under the arrogance of the scholar, or they did not believe what they told the public; the one in his extraordinary invention of an interpolating editor, and the other in his more extraordinary explanation of the Eleusinian mysteries. But what was still worse, the froth of the head became venom, when it reached the heart. Montaigne has also been censured for an apparent vanity, in making himself the idol of his lucubrations. If he had not done this, he had not performed the promise he makes at the commencement of his preface. An engaging tenderness prevails in these _naive_ expressions which shall not be injured by a version. "Je l'ay voue a la commodite particuliere de mes parens et amis; a ce que m'ayans perdu (ce qu'ils out a faire bientost) ils y puissent retrouver quelques traicts de mes humeurs, et que par ce moyen ils nourrissent plus entiere et plus vifue la conoissance qu'ils out eu de moi." Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and remember they are men, will be our favourites. He who writes from the heart, will write to the heart; every one is enabled to decide on his merits, and they will not be referred to learned heads, or a distant day. "Why," says Boileau, "are my verses read by all? it is only because they speak truths, and that I am convinced of the truths I write."