when you made this fine discovery. Did you really mistake the specimens I gave of professed captious criticism, for serious observations, and indications of mighty passion? I only gave you a string of observations, like your own with regard to me, and in your own language and manner, as nearly as I could imitate it. If they offend you, you have yourself only to blame. Your criticism. on my reading, I thought sufficiently obviated by retaliating on your spelling. The irony was visible to any that were willing to see it. You take it ill that your Magazine should be compared to the lowest publication in Europe. You have made it so in effect by your last letter, which, for scurrility and violence, is not to be matched by any of the publications of Mr EDMUND CURL, your worthy predecessor. You can make low comparisons enough, but you would not have them retorted upon yourself. Please learn to do as you would be done by. You tax me with using the language of a tinker, by which I suppose you mean a reviewer, these gentry being a kind of literary or book-tinkers, who commonly make as sad work, and use as coarse language as their sable brethren of the hammer. I should be ashamed to use

their language, unless in irony, or to themselves.

You call all the strictures that have been published on your Magazine mean and contemptible, which is a very short and convenient way of answering them; but perhaps the only one of which you are capable. The faults which disgrace your work are not of the typographical kind. They are much more important. Your fulsome encomiums on the blasphemous works of the Abbé RESNAL, and your commendation of HAWKSWORTHS obscenities, prove that sceptics and infidels have no small share of your charity; while your reproaching the memory of Mr PATRICK HAMILTON, upon mere conjecture, and your unworthy treatment of the Rev. Dr HENRY and Mr WALKER, shew that are no friend to good men, or sincere Christians. I cannot but think it an honour done me to suffer in so good company, and to be reviled by those who have reviled such men as these. I cannot admit your story of the Highland sergeant to be true; and if you observe the manner in which the Abbé RESNAL introduces it, you will find that he does not affirm it. I must call it ignorance

you

to mistake fable for history; If you had made the story yourself, I would have called it forgery. And I confess I could have no great opinion of a persons learning, who could not distinguish the history of ALEXANDER the Great, from that of Jack the Giant-killer, or the Seven Wise Masters.

You complain that I attribute the compositions of one person to another. I know none of your gentlemen behind the curtain, and so cannot distinguish their productions, I think nothing is more simple than that each should take what praise or blame is his own, and not meddle with what belongs to others. But it is very unlucky for one to receive a stab in the dark from a society of nameless gentlemen, as one knows not whom to complain of, whether Mr Publisher, Mr Printer, or Mr Reviewer, or the whole Dunciad in conjunction. When a charge is made against one gentleman, another gentleman, who was not charged, nor called, stands forth to defend him, and to deny the fact. This is mighty convenient, but not quite fair. If a society of gentlemen, indicted at the Old Bailey, were to be allowed to be witnesses and compurgators for one another,

in this manner, it would no doubt save a great many lives.

You reproach me with having been bred in a printers shop; a sure proof that the letter was not wrote by a printer, who could never reckon his own profession an indignity. But how you think it an indignity for one clergyman to be bred in a printing house, any more than for another to have been bred in an ale-house, I am at a loss to imagine, and would propose it as a problem to the curious.

You call me a spouter of plays in the General Assembly; but your great learning hindered you from knowing that St PAUL, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, and CICERO, in his oration pro Vatinio, have quoted plays as well as I did. I can bear any epithet that applies to such men as these. The Younger PLINY treats a remark like yours, upon my reading plays, with great contempt: Cur tragediam, quæ non auditorium, sed scenam et actores postulat, recitari concedunt?-At harum recitatio usu jam recepta est: num ergo culpandus est ille qui cœpit? How the allusion to a modern critic

could have given you such offence, or have been thought to point out a particular gentleman, unless that gentleman is conscious of guilt, I am unable to imagine. Critics are a tribe almost as numerous as caterpillars or politicians; so that any charge against one of these must seem very far from a particular one. But your denying the charge is superlatively comical. You say you are authorised to do so; but pray, Sir, by whom? Are you Advocate-general for all the critics and profligates of Great Britain? If so, till you produce your commission, your denial must go for nothing.

You accuse me of endeavouring to make your Magazine odious to a certain party in this Church; but you are not aware how much you have done that way yourself, especially when you constantly call a body of clergymen (inferior in nothing, except numbers, to their opponents) by the name of the wild party. This proves the truth of the remark you make in your preface, that "you have declined joining with any of the religious factions in Scotland ;" and is no great invitation for them to write in your Magazine, You likewise call those who would