REVIEWER.
Hold, hold, I beſeech you: your anxiety makes you forget yourſelf. If your imprudent diſcourſe ſhould get abroadtwo or three unfortunate anecdotes have lately circulated among our country readers. The well-known diſcovery on the ſubject of ‘thoſe truly original and excellent diſcourſes’ involved our corps. Poor Bk ſhould have kept his ſecret better. And the learned Doctor, who tranſlates Greek orations out of French, was near ſpoiling all by his eagerneſs. His critique had almoſt ſtepped into the world before his hiſtory. The management in this caſe was much too groſs.
In fact, if it was known that an individual critic, and not a ſociety, as it is given out, is oppoſed to an individual author—and that the former individual is ſometimes a friend, ſometimes an enemy or a rival of the latter, our articles would often be read as mere advertiſements—Take away our magic we, our ideal aſſociation, and our ſtanding joke, we grey-beards, and we ſhould be able to do as little execution upon the race of writers as Catherine without her ſtanding army upon the nations of infidels—So not a word more on this ſubject, I beg.
We now reſume our judicial capacity, and proceed to public ſentence. Here we brook neither interruption nor diſpute, witneſs our monthly correspondence, in which we ſo cavalierly garble, miſrepreſent, and confute the remonſtrances of the damned, whenever we do not find it more convenient to ſuppreſs them.
