Ker, in about a fortnight after the publication,) to make some noise,
and is fathered on Mr. Johnson, author of the English Dictionary, &c.
See to-day's Gazetteer. The critics are admirable in discovering a
concealed author by his style, manner, &c."

Their disappointment at the ultimate failure of the book was
proportioned, we may suppose, to the sanguineness of their first
expectations. But the reluctance with which an author yields to the sad
certainty of being unread, is apparent in the eagerness with which
Halhed avails himself of every encouragement for a rally of his hopes.
The Critical Reviewers, it seems, had given the work a tolerable
character, and quoted the first Epistle. [Footnote: In one of the
Reviews I have seen it thus spoken of:--"No such writer as Aristaenetus
ever existed in the classic era; nor did even the unhappy schools, after
the destruction of the Eastern empire, produce such a writer. It was
left to the latter times of monkish imposition to give such trash as
this, on which the translator has ill spent his time. We have been as
idly employed in reading it, and our readers will in proportion lose
their time in perusing this article."] The Weekly Review in the Public
Ledger had also spoken well of it, and cited a specimen. The Oxford
Magazine had transcribed two whole Epistles, without mentioning from
whence they were taken. Every body, he says, seemed to have read the
book, and one of those _hawking booksellers_ who attend the
coffeehouses assured him it was written by Dr. Armstrong, author of the
Oeconomy of Love. On the strength of all this he recommends that another
volume of the Epistles should be published immediately--being of opinion
that the readers of the first volume would be sure to purchase the
second, and that the publication of the second would put it in the heads
of others to buy the first. Under a sentence containing one of these
sanguine anticipations, there is written, in Sheridan's hand, the word