To the RIGHT HONOURABLE GEORGE LORD LYTTLETON. F : MY LORD, N looking round me, throughout the world, for fome diftinguished character, to whose protection and fostering care, I might commit the following performance, which stands so greatly in need of it, not only as it is the production of a nameless author, but because it combats many inveterate prejudices of the age and nation we live in, and likewife attacks some reputations established so firmly in the opinions of most men, that they may thought in no danger from any, I could be a3 5 mar. could think of no one to whom I could address it with so much propriety as to your Lordship. And that for feveral reafons. In the first place, your Lordship is the best and happiest imitator of Lucian our nation has yet produced, and you have, with a peculiar felicity, hit off the natural air and turn of his dialogue. In the next place, of a learned and animated writer, as your Lordship undoubtedly is, you are the purest and chastest of any I know now living, and the remoteft from that affectation and Lexiphanicism which are at once the disgrace and characteristick of the age. Therefore it was most natural for me, an humble follower of our own common and great original, and a declared advocate for the purity and fimplicity of language, to pitch upon your Lordship for a Patron, who are the best imitator of the one, or rather a more beautiful original in a path he has only shewn you, and give in your admirable writings, the best example of the other. But there was another confideration, which at the time influenced me even more than this, and made me think the present address, not only a matter of propriety in regard to myself, but alfo a fort of debt or atonement due to your Lordship. I beg leave to explain myself. I have been all my lifetime very little converfant with authors that can strictly be called modern; (for even Swift is now to be looked upon as a kind of ancient) and I reckon it my great happiness to have been so. I had indeed heard (for who that dabbles in books has not?) of the EXCELLENT RAMBLER, the great Mr. S-1 J-n; I had likewife feen his volumes on a bookfeller's counter, or a friend's table, and had fometimes taken them up with an intention to peruse a paper or fo, but was never able to go through the tafk; for being prefent ly disgusted with the pedantry and affectation in every page, I could not help throwing them down with a contempt and indignation, which, perhaps, the defects of the language excepted, might be very undeserved. At last, during a long voyage at sea, when I had access to no other English books but what I had been long acquainted and very familiar with, excepting the Ramblers, which happened accidentally to be on board, in order to divert the idle and folitary hours unavoidable in that fort of life, I was in a manner obliged to read them, which accordingly I did with great care and attention. I immediately perceived, and was very forcibly struck with the strong refemblance there subsists between Mr. J-n's character, and that of the Limousin scholar in Rabelais, and of Lexiphanes in Lucian. And I concluded, that an imitation of the latter would be admirably well fuited to |