Saturday Rave: The Critical Review 1813. The Battle of Bannockburn, Anon.

 The Word Den has one particular guilty pleasure: it just loves a one-star review.

Ooh, the sheer delight of a storming take-down. Well, it's a delight as long as it's not my work that's the subject of the review, obviously. Or a friend's. Or someone I admire. Or someone not very successful. Or someone who's down in the dumps...

Anyway, the star system wasn't operating in 1813, when this review of Bannockburn, a poem, In Four Books was published (the book itself came out in 1810). 

But the review...

...well, it starts like this:

THIS is an extraordinary poem, a very extraordinary poem indeed, and for once we Critics, who are seldom known to plead incapacity, confess ourselves wholly unable to appreciate its merits.

Ouch!

The review goes on to marvel at the lines:

retreating paces three,

With terror struck, kneeled on his knee.

And, at the end, the review does what every review should do, which is to sum up the various qualities of the subject ('gibberish, hobbled, singularly original') in a few neat sentences:

But now to be serious, we will no longer detain our readers with an account of a book which nothing, we conceive, but uneducated vulgarity could have produced; it is as contemptible a performance as we have ever witnessed in our critical capacity, nor would we, after it had laid in the grave for nearly two years, have roused it for a moment from its place of rest, but as a lesson to those buzzing flies who teaze some popular author, as the author in question does Walter Scott, by a professed imitation of a style the beauties of which they cannot comprehend, the defects of which they cannot avoid.

Ouch again!

Still...

...it is quite satisfying, all the same.

illustration by James William Edmund Doyle

Word To Use Today: critic. The word comes from the Latin criticus, and before that from the Greek kritēs, a judge.