PREFACE. HE usual design of Addresses of this sort is to implore the Candour of the Public; we have always had the more pleasing Province of returning Thanks and making our Acknowledgements for the kind Acceptance which our Monthly Collections have met with." I had the pleasure of addressing my readers in these terms one hundred and thirty-three years ago. My friend, Dr. Johnson, regarded the sentence as a fitting prelude to a general chastisement of my unscrupulous opponents. It would be a great satisfaction to me if he could now witness the peculiar realisation of his prophetic treatment of my foes. For example, the preface of 1738 was chiefly devoted to the annihilation of the writer of a certain periodical entitled Common Sense," printed by Purser, of White-Friers." My public notice of this person had so filled his head with idle chimeras of applause, laurels, and immortality, that he indulged himself in a wild prediction of the honours that would be showered upon him by future ages. "The plagiarising rogue!" exclaimed my friend the Doctor; "if he ever becomes known to posterity, it will be for his stupidity and ingratitude, and that only by our favour." I at once suggested to my illustrious contributor the propriety of embodying this thought in a prophetic criticism to grace my next preface. I turn back to the well-known page with a sigh that the learned Doctor is not here to see how completely his words are verified. Common Sense is only known through The Gentleman's Magazine, and I myself might have forgotten that spurious work had not my memory been excited by the following letter: acti. "MR. URBAN,-As you are the oldest conductor of periodical literature in England, so I imagine you must take the greatest pleasure in referring to the illustrious memories which are associated with your youthful days, and this without showing any signs of that imbecility which belongs to the mere laudator temporis If you are susceptible of such feelings, I suppose you can never peruse without gratification the elegant little ode which, according to Mr. Boswell, appeared, fresh from the hand of Johnson, in the number of your Magazine for March, 1738. I find from the same authority that in the following May appeared a translation, which is given at full length in the notes to Boswell's great work. It is my extreme dissatisfaction with the manner in which the elegant simplicity of the original is diluted with clumsy verbiage in this translation, which has induced me to offer you what I consider a superior version. Trusting that you |