Men are rarely able to assign a reason for their approbation or dislike on questions of taste; and therefore they willingly submit to any guide who boldly asserts his claim to superior discernment.

It is more difficult to ascertain and establish the merits of a poem than the powers of a machine or the benefits of a new remedy.

Hence it is in literature, that quackery is most easily puffed, and excellence most easily decried.
In some degree this argument applies to academies of the fine arts; and it is fully confirmed by all that I have ever heard of that institution which annually disfigures the walls of Somerset House with an acre of spoiled canvas.

But a literary tribunal is incomparably more dangerous.
Other societies, at least, have no tendency to call forth any opinions on those subjects which most agitate and inflame the minds of men.

The sceptic and the zealot, the revolutionist and the placeman, meet on common ground in a gallery of paintings or a laboratory of science.