A piece has been sent to me, called “Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795,” with a French motto:  “Que faire encore une fois dans une telle nuit?  Attendre le jour.”  The very title seemed to me striking and peculiar, and to announce something uncommon.  In the time I have lived to, I always seem to walk on enchanted ground.  Everything is new, and, according to the fashionable phrase, revolutionary.  In former days authors valued themselves upon the maturity and fulness of their deliberations.  Accordingly, they predicted (perhaps with more arrogance than reason) an eternal duration to their works.  The quite contrary is our present fashion.  Writers value themselves now on the instability of their opinions and the transitory life of their productions.  On this kind of credit the modern institutors open their schools.  They write for youth, and it is sufficient, if the instruction “lasts as long as a present love, or as the painted silks and cottons of the season.”

The doctrines in this work are applied, for their standard, with great exactness, to the shortest possible periods both of conception and duration.  The title is “Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795.”  The time is critically chosen.  A month or so earlier would have made it the anniversary of a bloody Parisian September, when the French massacre one another.  A day or two later would have carried it into a London November, the gloomy month in which it is said by a pleasant author that Englishmen hang and drown themselves.  In truth, this work has a tendency to alarm us with symptoms of public suicide.  However, there is one comfort to be taken even from the gloomy time of year.  It is a rotting season.  If what is brought to market is not good, it is not likely to keep long.  Even buildings run up in haste with untempered mortar in that humid weather, if they are ill-contrived tenements, do not threaten long to incumber the earth.  The author tells us (and I believe he is the very first author that ever told such a thing to his readers) “that the entire fabric of his speculations might be overset by unforeseen vicissitudes,” and what is far more extraordinary, “that even the whole consideration might be varied whilst he was writing those pages." Truly, in my poor judgment, this circumstance formed a very substantial motive for his not publishing those ill-considered considerations at all.  He ought to have followed the good advice of his motto:  “Que faire encore dans une telle nuit?  Attendre le jour.”  He ought to have waited till he had got a little more daylight on this subject.  Night itself is hardly darker than the fogs of that time.