and hearty defenders,-friends indeed,-for they burst upon me when I most needed them.

As for misrepresentations arising from dishonesty, or from ignorance, or a passionate mixture of both, I am too well aware of a certain quarter of the press not to have been prepared for them; and have too little respect for it, to feel them more than I ought. It is in the nature of things for those who differ with society, to be misconceived even by the best men, who are not very discerning: how much more must they reckon upon the attacks and mis-statements of those, whom a thousand fancied interests and mortified self-loves enlist on the side of abuse? The public themselves, as a body, have their vices; and conscious of practising a good deal of deception with one another, and persuading themselves it is unavoidable, are disposed to prefer a good regular scandal-monger whom

they can despise, before a humanist who speaks the truth in zeal and candour, let his sympathy with mankind at large be never so unequivocal. It is true, I believe he ultimately makes his way with them. They feel it to be their interest that he should; and they learn even to bring out their virtues at the warmth of his belief in virtue. But meanwhile it is only by an effort of generosity, that any man implicated in the present state of things, can think the best of another, whose faults differ with his own, and whose good qualities appear to rebuke

him.

All this will not hinder me from continuing to be sincere. I shall remain so to my dying day, knowing what an effect one strenuous example has upon society, contrary to what is eternally said to the reverse; and being of opinion, that the world is lost over and over again, solely by people's losing their hopes of

it in middle life. And I shall comfort myself under mistake and calumny meanwhile, by reflecting, that calumny itself is but a part of mistake; and that in thinking myself neither a bit better nor worse than any other man (which is what I think of all men, for they are all creatures of circumstance), I have a right both to the task which circumstances have put into my hands, and to the bestnatured construction that can be put upon my own errors.

Agreeably to these opinions, but protesting at the same time against any conclusion to be drawn from the confession, apart from a knowledge of all which this book contains, I frankly avow, that as far as the sincerity in it has taken a splenetic turn, which was a thing unnecessary, I wish it had never been written. I have other reasons also for the regret, which are not so easy of explanation; though I should have entered very freely into them, had

the hostility I have provoked taken a more generous turn. I can only hope, that in the long run, the very defect will be of use to the world; but speaking for myself in the meantime, I confess I have no wish to be thought ill of by any body; and the fault (singularly enough) is at variance with what I have said against it in the book, when I speak of some of my former writings. But even this inconsistency may serve to show, how much I was bent upon making true portraitures, rather than hostile ones-it was any thing but hostility which made me take the pencil in hand, as I have shown in the former preface; and the reader may smile at my simplicity (though there is a lesson for him in it, if he does) when I state, that in the sharpest things which I have written of some of my adversaries, I thought rather to have awakened their remorse, than roused in them a new spirit of aggression. It is true, to injure produces a desire to injure again; so naturally impatient

is humanity of the very thought of being unjust. But aware of this cause of the infirmity, (which to know handsomely is to overcome) and anxious to make amends for any wrong pointed out to me, I am always fancying that others are willing to go through the same reflections, and seat themselves as tranquilly at the end of them. I forget that you cannot arrive at any superiority of candour, by whatever process of adversity and mortification, but the tone it gives you serves only to exasperate an uncandid enemy.

Among twenty articles which I understand have been written against me in various publications, one has appeared in the Quarterly Review, such as I should no more have noticed, or looked at, than the others, had it not been for a pretended fact or two, which it may be as well to set aside. It has been well observed, that to answer these Blackwood people properly, (for the Review, it seems, is now connected with the unprincipled