Won’t you repent of having opened the correspondence, my dear Madam, when you find my letters come so thick upon you?  In this instance, however, I am only to blame in part, for being too ready to take advice, for the sole reason for which advice ever is taken, ’because it fell in with my inclination.  You said in your last that you feared you took up time of mine to the prejudice of the public; implying, I imagine, that I might employ it in composing.  Waving both your compliment, and my own vanity, I will speak very seriously to you on that subject, and with exact truth.  My simple writings have had better fortune than they had any reason to expect; and I fairly believe, in a great degree, because gentlemen-writers, who do not write for interest, are treated with some civility if they do not write absolute nonsense.  I think so, because I have not unfrequently known much better works than mine much more neglected, if the name, fortune, and situation of the authors were below mine.  I wrote early, from youth, spirits, and vanity; and from both the last when the first no longer existed.  I now shudder when I reflect on my own boldness; and with mortification, when I compare my own writings with those of any great authors.  This is So true, that I question"Whether it would be possible for me to summon up courage to publish any thing I have written, if I could recall the past, and should yet think as I think at present.  So much for what is over and out of my power.  As to writing now, I have totally forsworn the profession, for two solid reasons.  One I have already told you; and it is, that I know my own writings are trifling and of no depth.  The other is, that, light and futile as they were, I am sensible they are better than I could compose now.  I am aware of the decay of the middling parts I had, and others may be still more sensible of it.  How do I know but I am superannuated? nobody will be so coarse as to tell me so; but if I published dotage all the world would tell me so.  And who but runs that risk who is an author after severity?  What happened to the greatest author of this age, and who certainly retained a very considerable portion of his abilities for ten years after my age Voltaire, at eighty-four, I think, Went to Paris to receive the incense, in person, of his countrymen, and to be witness of their admiration of a tragedy he had written at that Methusalem age.  Incense he did receive till it choked him; and at the exhibition of his play he was actually crowned with laurel in the box where he sat.  But what became of his poor play?  It died as soon as he did—­was buried with him; and no mortal, I dare to say, has ever read a line of it since, it was so bad.(617)