I do not suppose that I am saying any thing which you do not know as well as myself. I am simply reminding you of a commonplace truth which your high admiration of me may have robbed perhaps of that weight which it ought to have with you. And this leads me to what gave me great concern, I mean the very unreasonable value which you set upon my writings, compared with those of others. You are young and ingenuous and I wrote with a hope of pleasing the young the ingenuous and the unworldly above all others, but sorry indeed should I be to stand in the way of the proper influence of other writers. You will know that I allude to the great names of past times, and above all to those of our own Country. I have taken the liberty of saying this much to hasten on the time, when you will value my poems not less, but those of others, more. That time I know would come of itself and may come sooner for what I have said, which at all events I am sure you cannot take ills.
How many things are there in a man's character of which his writings however miscellaneous or voluminous will give no idea. How many thousand things which go to making up the value of a frank and moral man concerning not one of which any conclusion can be drawn from what he says of himself or of others in the Worlds Ear. You probably would never guess from any thing you know of me, that I am the most lazy and impatient Letter writer in the world. You will perhaps have observed that the first two or three Lines of this sheet are in a tolerably fair, legible hand, and, now every Letter, from A to Z, is in complete route, one upon the heals of the other. Indeed so difficult Do I find