"It is _natural_ for young authors to conceive themselves the cleverest fellows in the world, and withal, that there is not the least degree of merit subsisting but in their own works: It is _natural_ likewise for them to imagine, that they may conceal themselves by appearing in different shapes, and that they are not to be found out by their stile; but little do these _Connoisseurs_ in writing conceive, how easily they are discovered by a veteran in the service. In the title-page to this performance we are told (by way of quaint conceit), that it was written by _the author_; what if it should prove that the Author and the Actor[A] are the same! Certain it is that we meet with the _same_ vein of peculiar humour, the same turn of thought, the same _autophilism_ (there's a new word for you to bring into the next poem) which we meet with in the other; insomuch that we are ready to make the conclusion in the author's own words: [Footnote A: _The Actor, a Poem, by Robert Lloyd, Esq._] Who is it?------LLOYD. "We will not pretend however absolutely to assert that Mr. L---- wrote this poem; but we may venture to affirm, that it is the production, jointly or separately, of the new triumvirate of wits, who never let an opportunity slip of singing their own praises. _Caw me, caw thee_, as Sawney says, and so to it they go, and _scratch_ one another like so many Scotch pedlars." In page 339, I find a passage referred to in the Index, under the head of "a notable instance of their candour," retracting their insinuations against Lloyd and Colman, and ascribing the poem in a particular vein of pleasantry to Mr. Flexney, the bookseller, and Mr. Griffin, the printer. Candour certainly did not require that they should acknowledge Mr. Churchill, whose name was now inserted in the title-page, as the author, or if author of any, at least not of a considerable part of the poem. That this was their sense of the matter, appears from their account of the apology for the Rosciad, p. 409. "This is another _Brutum Fulinen_ launched at the Critical Review by one Churchill, who it seems is a clergyman, and it must be owned has a knack at versification; a bard, who upon the strength of having written a few good lines in a thing called _The Rosciad_, swaggers about as if he were game-keeper of Parnassus." P. 410. "This apologist has very little reason to throw out behind against the Critical Reviewers, who in mentioning _The Rosciad_, of which he calls himself author, commended it in the lump, without specifying the bald lines, the false thoughts, and tinsel frippery from which it is not entirely free." They conclude with contrasting him with Smollet, in comparison of whom he is "a puny antagonist, who must write many more poems as good as the Rosciad, before he will be considered as a respectable enemy." Upon these extracts I will beg leave to make two observations.