Bos, Bentley, and Byron

Extract

If punctuation there must be, should I place the comma before or after piger? Our Wickham–Garrod Oxford Text has no hesitation in assigning the epithet piger to caballus. Let us turn therefore to E. C. Wickham's note on the passage: ‘piger is best taken (as Bentley) with caballus. There is no point in making the motive the same in both cases.’ ‘Criticism’, wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘is a goddess easy of access and forward of advance, who will meet the slow, and encourage the timorous; the want of meaning she supplies with words, and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.’ I am not setting myself up as a criticus criticorum, for The Preacher's warning ‘He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it’ is hard to forget. This little note hopes it will underline the lesson that a poet is often the best judge of poetry. My poet is, as the title implies, Lord Byron, my critic Richard Bentley, whose suggested improvements of Paradise Lost are not apt to be regarded as his monumentum aere perennius.