them, and collusions with the booksellers of authors that
cannot, which were required in the prosecution of this arduous
undertaking. Imagine to yourselves how often I have shuddered upon the
verge of petty larceny, and how repeatedly my slumbers have been
disturbed with visions of the King's-Bench Prison and Clerkenwell
Bridewell. You, gentlemen, sit in your easy chair, and with the majesty
of a Minos or an Aeacus, summon the trembling culprits to your bar. But
though you never knew what fear was, recollect, other men have snuffed a
candle with their fingers.

But I would not be misunderstood. Heroical as I trust my undertaking
proves me, I fear no man's censure, and court no man's applause. But I
look up to you as a respectable body of men, who have long united your
efforts to reduce the disproportioned members of an ancient republic to
an happy equality, to give wings to the little emmet of Grub-street, and
to hew away the excrescences of lawless genius with a hatchet. In this
character I honour you. That you have assumed it uncompelled and
self-elected, that you have exercised it undazzled by the _ignis fatuus_
of genius, is your unfading glory.

Having thus cleared myself from the suspicion of any sinister view, I
cannot here refrain from presenting you with a peace-offering. Had it
been in my power to procure gums more costly, or incense more fragrant,
I would have rendered it more worthy your acceptance.

It has been a subject upon which I have often reflected with
mortification, that the world is too apt to lay aside your lucubrations
with the occasions that gave birth to them, and that if they are ever
opened after, it is only with old magazines by staid matrons over their
winter fire. Such persons are totally incapable of comparing your
sentences with the maturer verdict of the public; a comparison that
would redound so much to your honour. What I design at present, is in
some measure to remedy an evil, that can never perhaps be entirely
removed. As the field which is thus opened to me is almost unbounded, I
will confine myself to two of the most striking examples, in Tristram
Shandy, and the Rosciad of Churchill.

In the Monthly Review, vol. 24, p, 103, I find these words:

"But your indiscretion, good Mr. Tristram, is not all we complain of in
the volumes before us. We must tax you with what you will dread above
the most terrible of all insinuations--nothing less than DULLNESS. Yes,
indeed, Mr. Tristram