My dear Sir, As I wholly rely upon your judgment for the excellency of the design in question, I wish you to be better acquainted with my abilities as a reviewer before I suffer my curiosity to be further gratified in respect to the plan of the work you have undertaken, or the names of those persons who, with yourself, have done me the very great honour to require my assistance.  Before I see you, then, and possess myself of your further confidence, it is proper that I should acquaint you that there is only one department of a Review for which I am in the least qualified, and that one combines plays and novels.  Yet the very few novels I have read, of later publications, incapacitates me again for detecting plagiary, or for making such comparisons as proper criticism may demand.  You will, perhaps, be surprised when I tell you that I am not only wholly unacquainted with the book you have mentioned to me, but that I never heard of it before.  If it be in French, there will be another insurmountable difficulty; for, though I read French, and have translated some French comedies, yet I am not so perfectly acquainted with the language as to dare to write remarks upon a French author.  If Madame Cottin’s “Malvina” be in English, you wish it speedily reviewed, and can possibly have any doubt of the truth of my present report, please to send it me; and whatever may be the contents, I will immediately essay my abilities on the work, or immediately return it as a hopeless case.

Yours very faithfully,

E. Inchbald.

On further consideration, however, Mrs. Inchbald modestly declined to become a contributor.  Notwithstanding her great merits as an author, she had the extremest diffidence in her own abilities.

Mrs. Inchbald to John Murray.

“The more I reflect on the importance of the contributions intended for this work, the more I am convinced of my own inability to become a contributor.  The productions in question must, I am convinced, be of a certain quality that will demand far more acquaintance with books, and much more general knowledge, than it has ever been my good fortune to attain.  Under these circumstances, finding myself, upon mature consideration, wholly inadequate to the task proposed, I beg you will accept of this apology as a truth, and present it to Mr. Hoppner on the first opportunity; and assure him that it has been solely my reluctance to yield up the honour he intended me which has tempted me, for an instant, to be undecided in my reply to his overture.—­I am, Sir, with sincere acknowledgments for the politeness of your letter to me,

“E.  Inchbald.”

And here the correspondence dropped.