puny adversaries, writers of no estimation or authority, then you will
justly blame me. I might as well bring in at once a fictitious speaker,
and thus fall into all the inconveniences of an imaginary dialogue. This
I shall avoid; and I shall take no notice of any author who my friends
in town do not tell me is in estimation with those whose opinions he
supports.

A piece has been sent to me, called "Some Remarks on the Apparent
Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795," with a
French motto: "_Que faire encore une fois dans une telle nuit? Attendre
le jour_." The very title seemed to me striking and peculiar, and to
announce something uncommon. In the time I have lived to, I always seem
to walk on enchanted ground. Everything is new, and, according to the
fashionable phrase, revolutionary. In former days authors valued
themselves upon the maturity and fulness of their deliberations.
Accordingly, they predicted (perhaps with more arrogance than reason) an
eternal duration to their works. The quite contrary is our present
fashion. Writers value themselves now on the instability of their
opinions and the transitory life of their productions. On this kind of
credit the modern institutors open their schools. They write for youth,
and it is sufficient, if the instruction "lasts as long as a present
love, or as the painted silks and cottons of the season."

The doctrines in this work are applied, for their standard, with great
exactness, to the shortest possible periods both of conception and
duration. The title is "Some Remarks on the _Apparent_ Circumstances of
the War _in the Fourth Week of October_, 1795." The time is critically
chosen. A month or so earlier would have made it the anniversary of a
bloody Parisian September, when the French massacre one another. A day
or two later would have carried it into a London November, the gloomy