Among the various observations that are continually being made among mankind there is none more universal than that which touches on the circumstances of individuals, or their poverty, or riches, we find it so much the task of the historian that even the commonest narrator is not without this as the chief topic of relation whenever the subject is the actions of men.

It is the duty of all those who read to judge of what they read, & it is a duty which all seem in some measure to act up to; who peruse the actions of men in the histories of their times. It may seem presumptious for men who have but a moderate education, and a very abstract authority to judge of events that happened thousands of years before their own Era, & yet we find that occurrences every day, there is no one who reads, who does not say that Alexander was ambitious, Areistedes just, Crassus avaricious, Cornillus great, or Corialanus proud, these are decisions which may be made by every one, & in every age, but what is more to be observed with wonder is the very easy manner in which states would be disposed of by the modern commentator, as the actions of Scipio, of Hannibal of Pericles, of Darius, or of Ptolemy, will alike bear his censure or praise, forgetting that he may have just caught an hours glance of them as a relief to some other study.

It is a very natural & equally common practice among us, when we find our own characters attacked, to question the authority of the accuser as if any one says we are all fools, we immediately enquire the source of wisdom, that has discovered what we were not able or willing to believe, & by duly supporting ouselves in the argument, it is rarely that we can complain of inequality in the conflict unless it is by our own faults, or ignorance of the subject we would wish to support, & if we fall it is by the right of power, & our sufferings should be without murmur, but who will not mark without indignation the dastardly attacks that are continually making on the characters of departed men, who are known to us by their superiority over us, & whose greatest faults were but small in comparison with our own.