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LETTER 73. TO THE EDITOR OF THE "MONTHLY MAGAZINE"
January 1798.
Sir,
I hope this letter may arrive time enough to answer its purpose. I
cannot help considering myself as having been placed in a very
ridiculous light by the gentlemen who have remarked, answered, and
rejoined concerning my "Monody on Chatterton". I have not seen the
compositions of my competitors (unless indeed the exquisite poem of
Warton's, entitled "The Suicide", refer to this subject), but this I
know, that my own is a very poor one. It was a school exercise, somewhat
altered; and it would have been omitted in the last edition of my poems
but for the request of my friend Mr. Cottle, whose property those poems
are. If it be not in your intention to exhibit my name on any future
month, you will accept my best thanks, and not publish this letter. But
if Crito and the Alphabet-men should continue to communicate on this
subject, and you should think it proper for reasons best known to
yourself to publish their communications, then I depend on your kindness
for the insertion of my letter; by which it is possible those your
correspondents may be induced to expend their remarks, whether
panegyrical or vituperative, on nobler game than on a poem which was, in
truth, the first effort of a young man, all whose poems a candid critic
will only consider as first efforts.
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