You have begun your ethic epistles in a masterly manner.  You have copied no other writer, nor will you, I think, be copied by any one.  It is with genius as it is with beauty; there are a thousand pretty things that charm alike; but superior genius, like superior beauty, has always something particular, something that belongs to itself alone.  It is always distinguishable, not only from those who have no claim to excellence, but even from those who excel, when any such there are.

I am pleased, you may be sure, to find your satire turn, in the very beginning of these epistles, against the principal cause—­for such you know that I think it—­of all the errors, all the contradictions, and all the disputes which have arisen among those who impose themselves on their fellow-creatures for great masters, and almost sole proprietors of a gift of God which is common to the whole species.  This gift is reason; a faculty, or rather an aggregate of faculties, that is bestowed in different degrees; and not in the highest, certainly, on those who make the highest pretensions to it.  Let your satire chastise, and, if it be possible, humble that pride, which is the fruitful parent of their vain curiosity and bold presumption; which renders them dogmatical in the midst of ignorance, and often sceptical in the midst of knowledge.  The man who is puffed up with this philosophical pride, whether divine or theist, or atheist, deserves no more to be respected than one of those trifling creatures who are conscious of little else than their animality, and who stop as far short of the attainable perfections of their nature as the other attempts to go beyond them.  You will discover as many silly affections, as much foppery and futility, as much inconsistency and low artifice in one as in the other.  I never met the mad woman at Brentford decked out in old and new rags, and nice and fantastical in the manner of wearing them, without reflecting on many of the profound scholars and sublime philosophers of our own and of former ages.

You may expect some contradiction and some obloquy on the part of these men, though you will have less to apprehend from their malice and resentment than a writer in prose on the same subjects would have.  You will be safer in the generalities of poetry; and I know your precaution enough to know that you will screen yourself in them against any direct charge of heterodoxy.  But the great clamour of all will be raised when you descend lower, and let your Muse loose among the herd of mankind.  Then will those powers of dulness whom you have ridiculed into immortality be called forth in one united phalanx against you.  But why do I talk of what may happen?  You have experienced lately something more than I prognosticate.  Fools and knaves should be modest at least; they should ask quarter of men of sense and virtue:  and so they do till they grow up to a majority, till a similitude of character assures them of the protection of the great.  But then