A modern, whose name I shall not mention,[145] because I would not make a silly paper sell, was born a critic and an Examiner, and, like one of the race of the serpent's teeth, came into the world with a sword in his hand. His works put me in mind of the story that is told of a German monk, who was taking a catalogue of a friend's library, and meeting with a Hebrew book in it, entered it under the title of "A book that has the beginning where the end should be." This author, in the last of his crudities, has amassed together a heap of quotations, to prove that Horace and Virgil were both of them modester men than myself, and if his works were to live as long as mine, they might possibly give posterity a notion, that Isaac Bickerstaff was a very conceited old fellow, and as vain a man as either Tully or Sir Francis Bacon. Had this serious writer fallen upon me only, I could have overlooked it; but to see Cicero abused, is, I must confess, what I cannot bear. The censure he passes upon this great man runs thus: "The itch of being very abusive, is almost inseparable from vainglory. Tully has these two faults in so high a degree, that nothing but his being the best writer in the world can make amends for them." The scurrilous wretch goes on to say I am as bad as Tully. His words are these: "And yet the Tatler, in his paper of September 26, has outdone him in both. He speaks of himself with more arrogance, and with more insolence of others." I am afraid by his discourse, this gentleman has no more read Plutarch than he has Tully. If he had, he would have observed a passage in that historian, wherein he has with great delicacy distinguished between two passions which are usually complicated in human nature, and which an ordinary writer would not have thought of separating. Not having my Greek spectacles by me, I shall quote the passage word for word as I find it translated to my hand. "Nevertheless, though he was intemperately fond of his own praise, yet he was very free from envying others, and most liberally profuse in commending both the ancients and his contemporaries, as is to be understood by his writings; and many of those sayings are still recorded, as that concerning Aristotle, that he was a river of flowing gold: of Plato's 'Dialogue,' that if Jupiter were to speak, he would discourse as he did. Theophrastus he was wont to call his peculiar delight; and being asked, which of Demosthenes his orations he liked best? he answered, the longest.