has, from his own experience, no doubt, formed an apology for that minute research, which some have thought this writer carried to excess.  “It may be alleged in our author’s favour, that a man who has a deep and extensive acquaintance with a subject, often sees a connexion and importance in some smaller circumstances, which may not immediately be discerned by others; and, on that account, may have reasons for inserting them, that will escape the notice of superficial minds.”

CONDEMNED POETS.

I flatter myself that those readers who have taken any interest in my volume have not conceived me to have been deficient in the elevated feeling which, from early life, I have preserved for the great literary character:  if time weaken our enthusiasm, it is the coldness of age which creeps on us, but the principle is unalterable which inspired the sympathy.  Who will not venerate those master-spirits “whose PUBLISHED LABOURS advance the good of mankind,” and those BOOKS which are “the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life?” But it has happened that I have more than once incurred the censure of the inconsiderate and the tasteless, for attempting to separate those writers who exist in a state of perpetual illusion; who live on querulously, which is an evil for themselves, and to no purpose of life, which is an evil to others.  I have been blamed for exemplifying “the illusions of writers in verse,"[168] by the remarkable case of Percival Stockdale,[169] who, after a condemned silence of nearly half a century, like a vivacious spectre throwing aside his shroud in gaiety, came forward, a venerable man in his eightieth year, to assure us of the immortality of one of the worst poets of his age; and for this wrote his own memoirs, which only proved, that when authors are troubled with a literary hallucination, and possess the unhappy talent of reasoning in their madness, a little raillery, if it cannot cure, may serve at least as a salutary regimen.

I shall illustrate the case of condemned authors who will still be pleading after their trials, by a foreign dramatic writer.  Among those incorrigible murmurers at public justice, not the least extraordinary was a M. Peyraud de Beaussol, who, in 1775, had a tragedy, Les Arsacides, in six acts, printed, “not as it was acted,” as Fielding says on the title-page of one of his comedies, but “as it was damned!”

In a preface, this Sir Fretful, more inimitable than that original, with all the gravity of an historical narrative, details the public conspiracy; and with all the pathetic touches of a shipwrecked mariner, the agonies of his literary egotism.

He declares that it is absurd to condemn a piece which they can only know by the title, for heard it had never been!  And yet he observes, with infinite naivete, “My piece is as generally condemned as if the world had it all by heart.”