1759. lawyer who, on "hearing his adversary talk of the war of
"Troy, the heauteous Helena, and the river Scamander,
" intreated the court to observe that his client was christened,
" not Scamander, but Simon." *

And here I will sum up briefly as I may, what remain to
be noticed of these humble and unacknowledged labours in
the Critical Review. The tone is more confident than in the
days when he wrote under the sign of the Dunciad; but the
fair appreciation is the same. Obscure and depressed as the
writer was, his free running hand very frankly betrays its
work, amid the cramped laborious penmanship with which
Smollett's big-wigged friends surrounded it. No man
wishing to hide under cover of a mean fortune, was ever so
easily detected. Favourite expressions, which to the end of
his life continued so, are here; thoughts he had turned to
happy use in his Irish letters, reappear again and again;
and disguise himself for Scroggen or James Willington as
he may, he cannot write from other inspiration, or with
a less natural instinctive grace, than his own. The work I
now refer to connects itself, for this reason, with the most
brilliant to follow. The foibles and social vanities which
his Chinese friend is soon with indulgent humour _to correct,
are here already clear to him;f the false poetic taste which
he will shortly supplant with his natural manly verse, he
does his best thus early to weaken and expose; and the
•do-me-good family romances, with which the moralmongers
of the day would make stand against the Roderick Randoms
and Tom Joneses, are thrust back from before the Vicar's
way. .

* Critical Review, vii. 369, April 1759.

f The reader will hardly fail to have observed that he seems already to have
had in his mind a forecast of his Chinese Letters when he was writing to Bryanton,
ante, p. 146.r of rhetoric: instancing the