Narrator

The narrator is a philosopher writing privately to Edward Clarke, whose papers were pressed into print by friends who thought them too useful to stay dormant. He admits the meanness of his own offering, distrusts his abilities, and yet throws his mite into the public receptacle because errors in education, like faults in the first concoction, carry their taint through every station of life. His tension is between modesty and conviction: he would rather someone abler rectify his mistakes than have his own opinion received.