Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles Churchill

Churchill is dragging a habit that feels as modern as a comment section: the reflex to condemn first and encounter later. The opening concession, "Though", is a small trapdoor. He grants that people may be "led" by forces that sound petty but recognizably human - whim, envy, resentment - and then turns that psychology into an indictment of culture. These critics are not thinking; they are being driven. The verb choice matters: they do not "criticize" or "disagree". They "damn" - a word from theology and the courts, suggesting moral sentencing without due process.

The sting lands in the final clause: "whom they never read". Churchill isn't just accusing them of ignorance; he's exposing a social performance. To damn an author you haven't read is to treat taste like tribal membership, to use opinion as a badge rather than a conclusion. The subtext is about power: unearned authority, the cheap status that comes from tearing down a name in public.

Context sharpens it. Churchill wrote in an 18th-century literary world where patronage, rivalry, and pamphlet warfare made reputations fragile and criticism strategic. Verse satire was the era's op-ed column, and Churchill wields couplets like a scalpel: balanced syntax, blunt moral vocabulary, no wasted ornament. It's a line designed to embarrass the poseur and warn the audience that cultural judgment, when detached from reading, becomes pure ressentiment dressed up as discernment.