that because the countries are at war, literature shall be entitled
to depredation.[1]

But the forestalling the Abbe's publication by London editions, both
in French and English, and thereby not only defrauding him, and
throwing an expensive publication on his hands, by anticipating the
sale, are only the smaller injuries which such conduct may occasion. A
man's opinions, whether written or in thought, are his own until he
pleases to publish them himself; and it is adding cruelty to injustice
to make him the author of what future reflection or better information
might occasion him to suppress or amend. There are declarations and
sentiments in the Abbe's piece, which, for my own part, I did not
expect to find, and such as himself, on a revisal, might have seen
occasion to change, but the anticipated piracy effectually prevented
him the opportunity, and precipitated him into difficulties, which,
had it not been for such ungenerous fraud, might not have happened.

This mode of making an author appear before his time, will appear
still more ungenerous, when we consider how exceedingly few men there
are in any country who can at once, and without the aid of reflection
and revisal, combine warm passions with a cool temper, and the full
expansion of imagination with the natural and necessary gravity of
judgment, so as to be rightly balanced within themselves, and to make
a reader feel, and understand justly at the same time. To call three
powers of the mind into action at once, in a manner that neither shall
interrupt, and that each shall aid and vigorate the other, is a talent
very rarely possessed.

It often happens, that the weight of an argument is lost by the wit of
setting it off, or the judgment disordered by an intemperate