men, until fact or argument be offered to convince you of your error.  One writer praises another; and it is very possible for writers so to combine as to cry down and, in some sort, to destroy the reputation of any one who meddles with the combination, unless the person thus assailed be blessed with uncommon talent and uncommon perseverance.  When I read the works of POPE and of SWIFT, I was greatly delighted with their lashing of DENNIS; but wondered, at the same time, why they should have taken so much pains in running down such a fool.  By the merest accident in the world, being at a tavern in the woods of America, I took up an old book, in order to pass away the time while my travelling companions were drinking in the next room; but seeing the book contained the criticisms of DENNIS, I was about to lay it down, when the play of ‘CATO’ caught my eye; and having been accustomed to read books in which this play was lauded to the skies, and knowing it to have been written by ADDISON, every line of whose works I had been taught to believe teemed with wisdom and genius, I condescended to begin to read, though the work was from the pen of that fool DENNIS.  I read on, and soon began to laugh, not at Dennis, but at Addison.  I laughed so much and so loud, that the landlord, who was in the passage, came in to see what I was laughing at.  In short, I found it a most masterly production, one of the most witty things that I had ever read in my life.  I was delighted with DENNIS, and was heartily ashamed of my former admiration of CATO, and felt no little resentment against POPE and SWIFT for their endless reviling of this most able and witty critic.  This, as far as I recollect, was the first emancipation that had assisted me in my reading.  I have, since that time, never taken any thing upon trust:  I have judged for myself, trusting neither to the opinions of writers nor in the fashions of the day.  Having been told by DR. BLAIR, in his lectures on Rhetoric, that, if I meant to write correctly, I must ‘give my days and nights to ADDISON,’ I read a few numbers of the Spectator at the time I was writing my English Grammar:  I gave neither my nights nor my days to him; but I found an abundance of matter to afford examples of false grammar; and, upon a reperusal, I found that the criticisms of DENNIS might have been extended to this book too.

77.  But that which never ought to have been forgotten by those who were men at the time, and that which ought to be made known to every young man of the present day, in order that he may be induced to exercise his own judgment with regard to books, is, the transactions relative to the writings of SHAKSPEARE, which transactions took place about thirty years ago.  It is still, and it was then much more, the practice to extol every line of SHAKSPEARE to the skies:  not to admire SHAKSPEARE has been deemed to be a proof of want of understanding and taste.  MR. GARRICK,