If there are any questions which you would like to ask me, as connected with your philosophy of the literary mind (_if_ mine be a literary mind), I will answer them fairly, or give a reason for _not_, good--bad--or indifferent.

At present, I am paying the penalty of having helped to spoil the public taste; for, as long as I wrote in the false exaggerated style of youth and the times in which we live, they applauded me to the very echo; and within these few years, when I have endeavoured at better things, and written what I suspect to have the principle of duration in it: the Church, the Chancellor, and all men, even to my grand patron, Francis Jeffrey, Esq., of the _Edinburgh Review_, have risen up against me, and my later publications.

Such is Truth! men dare not look her in the face, except by degrees; they mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of knowing her to be Minerva.

I do not mean to apply this mythological simile to my own endeavours, but I have only to turn over a few pages of your volumes to find innumerable and far more illustrious instances.

It is lucky that I am of a temper not to be easily turned aside, though by no means difficult to irritate.