How! Porphiry, after your great success, are you astonished to have found enemies, and to have lost the friend whom you most confided in? This astonishment, however, does you honour – Go on, and never abandon those noble sentiments which occasion it. Oh! may increase of years, and the woeful experience of riper age, never rob you of that extreme surprise, which envy, breach of faith, injustice, and malice, cause in you! Be, if it must be so, the victim of hatred. What does it signify, provided, while you suffer by it, you yourself feel not the torments of that detestable passion! If ever you should come to have a bad opinion of mankind, throw away your pen, and lay aside your studies: to be able to instruct and inform mankind, you must love them too. Works, produced under the influence of that sublime sentiment, will have a just claim to immortality. Why should you hate the rivals that envy you, and the enemies that persecute you? – Because they are worthless? – Proud boy! Are you very sure that you are naturally more worthy than they? If they have been misled by education, if they have never been restrained by the persuasive voice of a faithful friend, tell me which they deserve most, your hatred or your compassion? – And you! do you imagine that you owe to nature only the good qualities you possess? – Ungrateful youth! have you already forgot the happy days of your infancy? – Ah, my son! call to mind the school of Lagaraye, and you will be modest and more indulgent. – Ten anonymous pamphleteers have taken your work to pieces, and endeavoured to ridicule your person. A set of periodical writers have amused and diverted themselves in burlesquing you, though very aukwardly; like professed story – tellers, whose insipid, threadbare, and often-repeated stories provoke nobody's laughter but their own.