Vindication of the Covenanters Author:Thomas M'Crie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: mediocrity have originated from such inferior motives. We do not consider Count Rumford as occupying the same rank with ordinary writers on the culinary art, and... more » we do not wish to confound sober reformers with demagogues who would debauch the minds, and inflame the passions, of the mob, to gain their own selfish and unprincipled ends. We are willing to allow that there are individuals who commence novel-writers with the more generous and disinterested design of reforming the public taste, and of furnishing more rational and refined gratification to a numerous class of readers. To such writers we are ready to give all the praise which is due. And, indeed, when we consider the mass of insipid, stupid, and pernicious productions with which our circulating libraries are stuffed, and which are daily tossed from hand to hand until they are literally worn to tatters, we cannot but think that a man of genius and taste, who condescends to join such company, displays at once a great degree of courage and of self-denial, and we are not greatly surprised to find him choosing to send the offspring of his fancy into the world without his name, or under a false one, contented with enjoying his reputation, and the other fruits of his labour, incognito, and concealing himself from the public by means of a complicated piece of literary machinery. Most of our readers must have heard of, and not a few of them, it is probable, have read, those popular novels which lately appeared in this northern part of the island, and which, from the peculiar manners which they represented, and the ability of their execution, attracted the attention even of those who have no predilection chapter{Section 4for this species of composition. The earliest of these cannot be called a finished piece of writing. The pr...« less