The unprecedented increase in the practice of criticism during the eighteenth century spawns numerous satires that, like Samuel Johnson's famous Dick Minim papers, express anxiety over who has the right to perform such cultural arbitration. Johnson opens this issue of the Idler with a list of qualifications, ironically expressed as the standards that culture apparendy neglects:

The satire suggests that especially bad writers can still be critics, and this democratic access to criticism necessitates its qualitative decline. That which distinguishes good critical work from poor can be read between the lines: an inherent sense of invention, fostered by learning, curbed by judgment, and sustained by strength of mind – the definitive, masculine qualities of literature. Dick Minim represents the threat of an under-educated literate populace gaining the leisure to pursue vanity under the guise of wit.