A letter to Henry Cline, on imperfect developments of the faculties, mental and moral, as well as constitutional and organic, and on the treatment of impediments of speech.
- John Thelwall
- Date:
- 1810
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A letter to Henry Cline, on imperfect developments of the faculties, mental and moral, as well as constitutional and organic, and on the treatment of impediments of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![ia <] ai 163 sutedly I never yet met with an individual instance of proposed correction, that did not remind me of the schoolboy’s experiments upon his pen,—who every time he mended it, made it worse. In apply- ing this observation most unequivocally to your correspondent M.N. (Monthly Mag. p. 392, ) I hope I shall not wound his feelings, since I only accuse him of failing, where, perhaps, it is not given to human nature to be capable of succeeding. «T do not mean to assert—that the Paradise Lost is all perfection. That it might have been rendered still moré exquisite, by some retrenchments, cannot, I think, be denied ;and that the sublime genius of Milton might have substituted something: better in the place of those disputations of scholastic sub- tlety and quibbling metaphysics that occupy so many pages of his poem, I am ready enough to admit. But tho Milton may, sometimes, nod, Jet not criticism dream, that, where the pen of in- spiration has fallen from his hand, the deficiency is to be supplied by mortal talent. In the present mstance, however, it appears to me—that it is not Milton who nods, but his commentator, who slum- bers: nor would I, for my own part, change a single iota of the noble passage quoted by your | M 2](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33089449_0175.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
