literary Luminary, of the age [this illiterate farthing candle!] should pay a greater deference to the words of his predecessor Mr Pope:
“Curs’d be the verse, how smooth soe’er it flow,” etc.
[We doubt, however, if any of this honest gentleman’s readers will think his verses worth a curse, whatever they may think he deserves for his impudence.]
This energetic effort on the part of the Review to prevent undue reputations being made by disguised advertisements, had little effect in checking an evil which flourishes unto this day—which will, in fact, flourish as long as a majority exist ready to believe anything they are told, and to be more than usually prompt with their credulity when what they are told is more than usually wrong. The next notification we select is from the British Chronicle of January 4-6, 1762, and is of a literary character also, though, judging by the motto adopted, the work is more likely to produce melancholy than amusement:—
This day are published, Price 1s.,
THE Songs of Selma, attempted in English verse, from the original of Ossian, the son of Fingal. . . . . Quis talia fando Tempenet a lacrymis?. . . . Printed for R. Griffiths, opposite Somerset House in the Strand; C. Henderson, at the Royal Exchange; and G. Woodfall, Charing Cross.
How many books of this kind have been published, thrown aside, and forgotten, or consigned to the pastrycook and trunkmaker, since the “Songs of Selma” saw the light, is a question easier to ask than to solve. One thing