Note 36 — Chapter VI

Mill.] As we are not a little anxious to cultivate the intimacy so happily commenced between the Doctor and ourselves, we feel bound in candor to confess the charge made against us, of having borrowed from him some of the phrases and ideas of our last number; and we justify ourselves by attributing it to our high regard for his talents: for what can be a greater proof of friendship, nowadays, than borrowing? If we were his enemies, we might justify it by the old maxim of “foiling the devil with his own weapons.” As to the “mill,” which the Doctor so vociferously claims, honest Pindar acknowledges that he borrowed the idea from the Doctor’s writings in general, for he never dipped in them without thinking of our nocturnal music-grinder, who continually grinds over and over the same sleepy tune of, “O, hard is my fate.”