call him a rogue, so you may call a scribbler a rogue and welcome, so you do not call him a dunce: which is like Foote's stroke at a society who sometime ago set themselves up as reformers, under the appellation of The Christian Club.

Having talked of hanging, and being told that such an insinuation would give offence, for that a brother of one of the members had been hanged, he changes his ground, and talks of damning.—
'That is right,' says the other, 'damn as much as you please; for though the Christian club may have some fears of the gallows, they do not value damnation of a brass farthing!'

The truth of this distinction which I have made will, I think, be pretty clearly established, by a consideration that the traffic of the lawyers depends on certain things called goods, chattles, houses, hereditaments—in short any thing that can be conveyed—whereas the scribblers cannot always convey the object of their traffic, even in idea. A lampoon is not attachable; or, if it were, it would be of no value. There is nothing tangible in a modern Pindaric ode; or, if there were, as Shakespeare has it,
'Those that touch pitch will be defiled.'
Nor can poor Priscian bring his action of battery, though we see his head broken every day.


Thus, while they steer clear of hitting the man, they may discharge whole vollies of their pointless arrows at the writer with safety. He has no objection to their picking up their crumbs at his expence. The sun nurtures myriads of insects, that at once inhale poison and preservation from his genial influence.
As I certainly allude to the abuse with which, in my life, I have been so foully bespattered, it should seem as if I had drawn this conclusion with a view to announce myself a man of genius. Were I so weak, I should be in a lamentable error indeed. For an author, with the smallest pretensions to fame, I ought by this time to have been abused ten times more than I have; unless indeed I rate the quality of the abuse in addition to the quantity, and so, by throwing one lump of invidious rascality into the scale, make it preponderate in my favour.
I am afraid however I am not so lucky; for, in this case, I must take in the idea that the slander

of a rogue is a compliment to an honest man: and I have already said, that every thing beyond literary defamation is here out of the question. I have