find Johnson added to the list. This compliment met
with a handsome requital; for Johnson, soon after, having occasion to
speak of Beattie, in his Life of Gray, called him a poet, a philosopher,
and a good man.

In his Essay, he comforts himself with the belief "that he had enabled
every person of common sense to defeat the more important fallacies of
the sceptical metaphysicians, even though he should not possess
acuteness, or metaphysical knowledge, sufficient to qualify him for a
logical refutation of them." It is lamentable to see at how great a cost
to himself he had furnished every person of common sense with these
weapons of proof. In a letter to Sir William Forbes, written not long
after, he makes the following remarkable confession. "How much my mind
has been injured by certain speculations, you will partly guess when I
tell you a fact that is now unknown to all the world, that since the
Essay on Truth was printed in quarto, in the summer of 1776, I have
never dared to read it over. I durst not even read the sheets, and see
whether there were any errors in the print, and was obliged to get a
friend to do that office for me."

As he proceeded, he seems to have become more afraid of the faculty of
reason. In the second edition he had said, "Did not our moral feelings,
in concert with what our reason discovers of the Deity, evidence the
_necessity_ of a future state, _in vain should we pretend_ to judge
rationally of that revelation by which life and immortality have been
brought to light." In the edition of 1776, he softened down this
assertion so much, as almost to deprive it of meaning. "Did not our
moral feelings, in concert with what reason discovers of the Deity,
evidence the _probability_ of a future state, and that it is necessary
to the full vindication of the divine government, _we should be much
less qualified_ than we now are to judge rationally of that revelation
by which life and immortality have been brought to light." There was
surely nothing, except perhaps the word _necessity_, that was
objectionable in the proposition as it first stood.

It may be remarked of his prose style in general, that it is not free
from that constraint which he, with much candour, admitted was to be
found in the writings of his countrymen.

Of his critical works, I have seen only those appended to the edition of
his Essay, in 1776. Though not deficient in acuteness, they have not
learning or elegance enough to make o