Here I might have rested.  But when I found that the great advocate, Mr. Erskine, condescended to resort to these bumper toasts, as the pure and exuberant fountains of politics and of rhetoric, (as I hear he did, in three or four speeches made in defence of certain worthy citizens,) I was rather let down a little.  Though still somewhat proud of myself, I was not quite so proud of my voucher.  Though he is no idolater of fame, in some way or other Mr. Erskine will always do himself honor.  Methinks, however, in following the precedents of these toasts, he seemed to do more credit to his diligence as a special pleader than to his invention as an orator.  To those who did not know the abundance of his resources, both of genius and erudition, there was something in it that indicated the want of a good assortment, with regard to richness and variety, in the magazine of topics and commonplaces which I suppose he keeps by him, in imitation of Cicero and other renowned declaimers of antiquity.

Mr. Erskine supplied something, I allow, from the stores of his imagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs into solemn special arguments at the bar.  So far the thing showed talent:  however, I must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar.  The toasts at the first hand were better than the arguments at the second.  Even when the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit.  But when his Grace gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when that sad draught had been farther infected with the jail pollution of the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed and ineffectually stummed again into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all the high flavor and mantling of my honors tasteless, flat, and stale.  Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes, and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine.

I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this age to the publication of their opinions:  I mean Citizen Thomas Paine, and his Grace the **** of *******.  I am not so great a leveller as to put these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic of letters; but “the field of glory is a field for all.”  It is a large one, indeed; and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over the boundless expanse of that wild heath whose horizon always flies before us.  I assure his Grace, (if he will yet give me leave to call him so,) whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs or of the bar, that Citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples,