“I give you thanks,” as Parson Fletcher says, for your dissertation upon apologies and old sayings. You have stored up enough to fill a volume, if I should take your last as a specimen of the quantity. However, they are things I trouble myself but little about, and I should rather be inclined to join in railing against them than in enumerating their good effects. I perceive that you were much more inclined to be their advocate after supper than you were before. You had just laid down your pen after venting all your spleen and ill-nature (occasioned by your impatience for roast-beef) upon these poor harmless old sayings. You return, with an entire new set of sentiments on the subject. You commence their advocate with more vehemence than is usual with you, and conclude by making them the very foundation of every virtue. Now I have endeavored to find some natural cause for this sudden change, but cannot. Was it that you heard one trickle from the lips of some favorite fair with eloquence too powerful to be resisted? Or was it a bumper of wine which proved so warm a friend to them? Or was it the good-natured effects of the roast-beef, which exhilarating your spirits, made you look with an eye of pity and compassion on these poor neglected things, and endeavor by rubbing off the rust and polishing them anew, to compensate for your malicious endeavors to lessen their merit? But after all I must confess myself a great enemy to them, in conversation particularly. I never knew a person who made frequent use of them, but I pitied them for the scanty portion of ideas which must have driven them to such a paltry theft; and moreover, if I must steal the idea, I would clothe it myself, lest its garment should betray me. I dislike them because they are in every body’s mouth, the greatest fool on earth has sense enough to use them with as much propriety as any other, and you will find every old beggar has his wallet stuffed full of them, ready to launch out on every occasion. I don’t know, however, but you are perfectly right in what you say in their defence. I am inclined to believe what you say is just, but I have so often seen instances of their meaning being perverted to answer some vicious purpose that I am compelled to believe the balance is against them. “So much for old sayings.”—But now as to apologies, I must with _due reverence_ beg leave to differ from you in my opinion of them. I am by no means inclined to think they are never used but when we know ourselves in fault, and that we ought always to suspect the sincerity of any one who makes them. You certainly must have known instances when they were essentially necessary, and not to have made them would have proved an obstinacy of disposition quite as disagreeable as insincerity. I hate this parade and nonsense about _independence_, which every gentleman of _ton_ puts on; it always proves that the reality is small, when such a fuss is made for the appearance.