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Rh while, in adjusting the perplexed rights of the innumerable claimants in this intellectual and shadowy region, a task is imposed on the writer, resembling not unfrequently the labour of him, who should have attempted to circumscribe, by mathematical lines, the melting and intermingling colours of Arachne’s web;

But I will not add to the number (already too great) of the foregoing pages, by anticipating, and attempting to obviate, the criticisms to which they may he liable. Nor will I dissemble the confidence with which, amid a variety of doubts and misgivings, I look forward to the candid indulgence of those who are best fitted to appreciate the difficulties of my undertaking. I am certainly not prepared to say with Johnson, that “I dismiss my work with frigid indifference, and that to me success and miscarriage are empty sounds.” My feelings are more in unison with those expressed by the same writer in the conclusion of the admirable preface to his edition of Shakespeare. One of his reflections, more particularly, falls in so completely with the train of my own thoughts, that I cannot forbear, before laying down the pen, to offer it to the consideration of my readers.

“Perhaps I may not be more censured for doing wrong, than for doing little; for raising in the public, expectations which at last I have not answered. The expectation of ignorance is indefinite, and that of knowledge is often tyrannical. It is hard to satisfy those who know not what to demand, or those who demand by design what they think impossible to be done.”