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TO THE AUTHOR OF THE MIRROR.

SIR,

I AM one of a family of young ladies, who read your paper, with which we have been hitherto tolerably well pleased, though we could wish it were not quite so grave, and had a little more love in it. But we have found out, of late, that it is none of your own, but mostly borrowed from other people. A cousin of ours, who is himself a fine scholar, and has a great acquaintance among the critics, shewed us many different instances of this. Your first paper, he told us, was copied from the first paper of the Spectator; and, upon looking into both, we found them exactly the same, all about the author and the work from beginning to end. Your Umphraville, he said, was

just Sir Roger de Coverley; which we perfectly agreed in, except that my sister Betsy observed, Umphraville wanted the widow, which all of us think the very best part of Sir Roger. Your Bobby Button, he assured us, was borrowed from No. 13. of "The True Patriot," published by Mr Fielding, who wrote "Tom Jones ;" and there, indeed, we found there was a story of a young gentleman, who liked French wine better than his country, just like Sir Bobby. No. 72. which we thought a very sweet paper, he informed us was taken from the "Night Thoughts;" and, indeed, though we don't understand Latin, we saw plainly, that the mottos were the same to a T. All this, however, we might have overlooked, had not a gentleman, who called here this morning, who used formerly to be a great advocate for the Mirror, confessed to us, that our cousin's intelligence was literally true;

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and, more than all that, he told us, that your very last number was to be found, every word of it, in Johnson's Dictionary.

We send you therefore notice, sir, that unless you can contrive to give us something new for the future, we shall be obliged to countermand our subscription for the Mirror. We can have a reading of a fresh Novel every morning for the money, with a spick and span new story in it, such as none of us ever read or heard of in all our lives before.

Yours, &c.

EVELINA.

No. 99. TUESDAY, April 18, 1780.

-Juvat, aut impellit ad iram,

Aut ad humum, mærore gravi, deducit et angit.

HOR.

CRITICISM, like every thing else, is subject to the prejudices of our education, or of our country. National prejudice, indeed, is, of all deviations from justice, the most common and the most allowable; it is a near, though perhaps an illegitimate relation of that patriotism, which has been ranked among the first virtues of characters the most eminent and illustrious. To authors, however, of a rank so elevated as to aspire to universal fame, the partiality of their countrymen has been sometimes prejudicial; in proportion as they have unreasonably applauded, the critics of

other countries, from a very common sort of feeling, have unreasonably censured; and there are few great writers, whom prejudice on either side may not, from a partial view of their works, find some ground for estimating at a rate much above, or much below, the standard of justice.

No author, perhaps, ever existed, of whom opinion has been so various as Shakespeare. Endowed with all the sublimity, and subject to all the irregularities, of genius, his advocates have room for unbounded praise, and their opponents for frequent blame. His departure from all the common rules which criticism, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, has imposed, leaves no legal code by which the decision can be regulated; and in the feelings of different readers, the same passage may appear simple or mean, natural or preposterous, may excite admiration, or create disgust.

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