_Nihil rerum mortalium tam instabile ac fluxum est, quam fama_--TACITUS. The diversion of _baiting_ an AUTHOR has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teizing other _animals_ because for the most part HE comes voluntarily to the stake. RAMBLER, No. 176. SECOND EDITION. LONDON: Printed for the AUTHOR; and sold by J. STOCKDALE; AND W. CREECH, Edinburgh. M.DCC.LXXXII. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. Man is endowed with sagacity sufficient to discover his errors, but seldom has fortitude to forsake them. Hence it arises that even the weakest of the species can point out the follies of his companions, and fancies that he can reform his own. We are amazed that a being like ourselves should thus deliberately act below the dignity of reason, but we forget that our own conduct may also be reviewed with contempt and pity. The world is buried in prejudice: Every department of knowledge is deeply infected by its fatal poison. Thus we frequently respect or reprobate a book without a perusal, merely on account of the Author's name. Not one in ten thousand of his panegyrists hath ever comprehended the system of Newton.--What then is the value of _their_ approbation? The public have long heard that a late English Dictionary is a most masterly performance; but is there a single man in England who ever read it half through? No. The school-boy imagines that it is above his capacity: The man of letters feels it to be below his; but being considered as a fashionable decoration in a closet of books, it is bought without the least chance of being perused, and WE (for the _first_ time to be sure) have been admiring we know not what. However as the variety of our sentiments is without end, it often happens, that while a philosopher is celebrated by one part of his readers, he is despised by some of the rest. Almost all the great authors of the present age have been more bitterly reviled than any other subjects of England, the Ministry excepted. But in a matter so frivolous as the merit of a book, the public are seldom guilty of gross injustice. Indeed, when an acute historian continues, in contempt of his own conviction, to persist in a falsehood, merely because he hath once affirmed it--when an elegant poet, in search of sublimity, soars, or rather sinks beyond the kenn of common sense[1]--when an astronomer treats his antagonist like a felon--when an advocate of piety impregnates his pages with slander, scurrility, and treason--then the world may be pardoned though they abate something of their veneration for the dignity of the learned.