LETTER to the AUTHOR. By a LOVER of VIRTUE. _LONDON:_ Printed for J. DOWSE, opposite _Fountain Court_ in the _Strand_. MDCCLIV. [Price One Shilling.] [Decoration] Critical Remarks, _&c._ SIR, I hope you will take nothing amiss that may be said in the following remarks on your compositions; I firmly believe that your motive in writing them was a laudable intention to promote and revive the declining causes of religion and virtue. And when I have said so much, I have surely a right from you to the same favourable interpretation of my design, in publishing these Considerations on them, and endeavouring to shew how far you have fallen short of your commendable purpose. That your writings have in a great measure corrupted our language and taste, is a truth that cannot be denied. The consequences abundantly shew it. By the extraordinary success you have met with, if you are not to be reckoned a classical author, there is certainly a very bad taste prevailing at present. Our language, though capable of great improvements, has, I imagine, been for some time on the decline, and your works have a manifest tendency to hasten that on, and corrupt it still farther. Generally speaking, an odd affected expression is observable through the whole, particularly in the epistles of Bob Lovelace. His many new-coin’d words and phrases, Grandison’s _meditatingly_, Uncle Selby’s _scrupulosities_; and a vast variety of others, all of the same Stamp, may possibly become Current in common Conversation, be imitated by other writers, or by the laborious industry of some future compiler, transferred into a Dictionary, and sanctioned by your great Authority. Your success has farther corrupted our taste, by giving birth to an infinite series of other compositions all of the same kind, and equally, if not more, trifling than your’s. A catalogue of them would look like a Bible genealogy, and were I to undertake the task of giving it, I should be obliged to invoke the muse, as Homer does before he begins the catalogue of the ships in his second Iliad. How long the currency of such compositions may continue, how many may be annually poured forth from the press, is more than any man can say, without being endued with the spirit of prophesy. But, without making any such pretensions, I can foretel, that if ever a good taste universally prevails, your romances, as well as all others, will be as universally neglected, and that in any event their fate will not be much better; for what recommends them to the notice of the present age is, their novelty, and their gratifying an idle and insatiable curiosity. In a few years that novelty will wear off, and that Curiosity will be equally gratified by other Compositions, it may be, as trifling, but who will then have the additional charm of novelty, to recommend them. Such, Sir, must be the fate of all works which owe their success to a present capricious humor, and have not real intrinsic worth to support them.