EPISTLE PREMONITORY FOR THE READER; BUT CONTRA-MONITORY AND IN REPLY TO DICK PROOF, CORRECTOR. Or the sundry sorts of vice, Richard, that obtain in this sinful world, one of the most troublesome is advice, and no less an annoyance to my feelings, than a pun is to thine. Lay your scene further off!!" Was ever historian before affronted by so wild a suggestion? If, indeed, the moods, measures, and events of the last six years, insular and continental, or the like of that, had been the title and subject-matter of the work; and you had then advised the transfer of the scene to Siam and Borneo, or to Abyssinia and the Isle of Ormus-there would be something to say for it, verisimilitudinis causâ, or on the ground of lessening the improbability of the narrative. But in the history of Maxilian!Why, the locality, man, is an essential part of the à priori evidence of its truth! * In a biographical work,* the properties of place are indispensable, Dick. To prove this, you need only change the scene in the History of Rob Roy from the precipices of Ben Lomond, and the glens and inlets of the Trossacs (the Trossacs worthy to have made a W. S. but that a W. S. is only of God's making, " nasci tur non fit") to Snow-hill, Breckneck Stairs, or Little Hell in Westminster-by going to which last-named place, Dick, when we were at the school, you evaded the guilt of forswearing for telling of me to our master, after you had sworn that you would go did-well knowing where you meant me to understand you, and where in honor you ought to have gone― but this may be mended in time. if you And lay the time further back! But why, Richard? I pray thee tell me why? The present, you reply, is not the age of the supernatural. Well, and if I admit, that the age at present is so fully attached to the unnatural in taste, the præternatural in life, and the contra-natural in philosophy, * In biography, which, by the bi-, reminds me of a rejoinder made to me, nigh 30 years ago, by Parsons the Bookseller, on my objecting to sundry anecdotes in a MS. Life, that did more credit to the wit and invention of the author, than to his honesty and veracity. "In a professed biography, Mr. P." quoth I, pleadingly, and somewhat syllabically." Biography, sir,” interrupted he, “Sellography is what I want.” as to have little room left for the supernatural-yet what is this to the purpose? I can not antedate the highly respectable personage, into whose company I have presumed to bring you-I may make THE READER sleep, but I can not make him one of the Seven Sleepers, to awake at my request for the first time since he fell into his long nap over the Golden Legend, or the Vision of Alberic! Or does the reader, thinkest thou, believe that witch and wizard, gnome, nymph, sylph, and salamander, did exist in those days; but that, like the mammoth and megatherim, the race is extinct? Will he accept as fossils, what he would reject as specimens fresh caught-herein differing widely from the old woman, who, as the things were said to have happened so far off and so long ago, hoped in God's mercy, there was not a word of truth in them? Thou mayest think this, Richard, but I will neither affront the reader by attributing to him a faith so dependent on dates, nor myself, whose history is a concave mirror, not a glass-case of mummies, stuffed skins of defunct monsters, and the anomalous accidents of nature. Thus, Richard, might I multiply thy objection, but that I detest the cui bono, when it is to be a substitute for the quid veri. Nor will I stop at present to discuss thy insinuation against the comparative wisdom of the sires of our great-grandsires, though at some future time I would fain hear thy answers to the doubts and queries in my second motto, originally started by Master Rabelais, in that model of true and perpetual history, the Travels of Garagantua and his friends. Without condescending to non-suit you by the flaws in your indictment, I assert the peculiar fitness of this age, in which, by way of compromising the claims of memory and hope, the rights both of its senior and of its junior members, I comprise the interval from 1770 to 1870. An adventurous position, but for which the age, I trust, will be "my good masters"--the more so, that I must forego one main help towards establishing the characteristic epithets rightfully appertaining to its emblazonment—namely, an exposé of its own notions, of its own morals and philosophy. But Truth, I remember, is reported to have already lost her front teeth (dentes incisores et prehensiles) by barking too close at the heels of the restive fashion a second blow might leave her blind as well as toothless. Besides, a word in your ear, Richard Proof, I do not half trust you. I mean, therefore, to follow Petrarch's* example, and confine my confidence on these points to a few dear friends and revered benefactors, to whom I am in the habit of opening out my inner man in the world of spirits—a world which the eyes of "the profane vulgar" would probably mistake for a garret floored and wainscoted with old books; tattered folios, to wit, and massive quartos in no better plight. For the due nutriment, however, of scorn and vanity—which are in fact much the same; for contempt is nothing but egotism turned sour-for the requisite supply, I say, of our social wants (Reviews, Anecdotes of Living Authors, Table-talk, and such-like provender), it will suffice if I hereby confess, that with rare exceptions these friends of mine were all born and bred before the birth of Common Sense by the obstetric skill of Mr. Locke, nay, prior to the first creation of intellectual Light in the person of Sir Isaac Newton -which latter event (we have Mr. Pope's positive assurance of the fact) may account for its universal and equable diffusion at present, the Light not having had time to collect itself into individual luminaries, the future suns, moons, and stars of the mundus intelligibilis. This, however, may be hoped for on or soon after the year 1870, which, if my memory does not fail me, is the date apocalyptically deduced by the Reverend G. S. Faber, for the commencement of the Millennium. But though my prudential reserve on these points must subtract from my forces numerically, this does not abate my reliance on the sufficing strength of those that remain. No! with confidence and secular pride I affirm, there is no age you could suggest, the characteristic of which is not to be found in the present —that we are the quintessence of all past ages, rather than an age of our own. You recommend, you say, the Dark Ages; and *The passage here alluded to, I should, as an elevated strain of eloquence warm from the heart of a great and good man, compare to any passage of equal length in Cicero. I have not the folio edition of Petrarch's works by me (by-the-bye, the worst printed book in respect of blunders I know of, not excepting even Anderson's British Poets) and can not therefore give any particular reference. But it is my purpose to offer you some remarks on the Latin Works of Petrarch, with a few selections, at a future opportunity. It is pleasing to contemplate in this illustrious man, at once the benefactor of his own times, and the delight of the succeeding, and working on his contemporaries most beneficially by that portion of his works, which is least in account with his posterity.-S. T. C. that the present boasts to be the contrary. Indeed? I appeal then to the oracle that pronounces Socrates the most enlightened of men, because he professed himself to be in the dark. The converse, and the necessary truth of the converse, are alike obvious: besides, as already hinted, in time all light must needs be in the dark, as having neither reflection nor absorption; yet may, nevertheless, retain its prenomen without inconsistency; by a slight change in the last syllable, by a mere-for “ed” read "ing." For whatever scruples may arise as to its being an enlightened age, there can be no doubt that it is an enlightening one—an era of enlighteners, from the Gas Light Company to the dazzling Illuminati in the Temple of Reason-not forgetting the diffusers of light from the Penny-Tract-Pedlary, nor the numberless writers of the small, but luminous works on arts, trades, and sciences, natural history, and astronomy, all for the use of children from three years old to seven, interwoven with their own little biographies and nursery journals, to the exclusion of Goody Two Shoes, as favoring superstition, by one party; and of Jack the Giant-killer, as a suspicious parody on David and Goliah, by the other. Far, far around, where'er my eyeballs stray, Or, as Propria Quæ Maribus, speaking (more prophetico, et proleptice) of the Irradiators of future (i. e. our) Times long ago observed, they are common, quite a common thing ! Sunt commune Parens, Authorque; Infans, Adolescens ; So far, at least, you will allow me to have made out my posi tion. But if by a dark age you mean an age concerning which we are altogether in the dark; and as, in applying this to our own, the Subject and Object, we and the age become identical and commutable terms; I bid adieu to all reasoning by implication, to all legerdemain of inferential logic, and at once bring notorious facts to bear out my assertion. Could Hecate herself, churning the night-damps for an eye-salve, wish for an age more in the dark respecting its own character, than we have seen exemplified in our next-door neighbor, the Great Nation, when, on the bloodless altar of Gallic freedom, she took the oath of peace and good-will to all mankind, and abjured all conquests but those a stu of reason? Or in the millions throughout the continent, who be- What time it rose, o'er-peering, from behind, and " taught by others' harms," a very ungallic respect for the more ancient code, vulgarly called the Ten Commandments, left the lands as it found them, content with excluding their owners -owners of four parts out of five, at least, the church and nobility-from all share in their representation? Or when the same genius, the emblem and vicegerent of the present age in Spain, poising the old indigenous loyalty with the newly-imported state-craft, secured to the monarch the revenue of a caliph, with the power of a constable? But Piedmont! but Naples-the Neapolitans the age of patriotism, the firm, the disinterestedthe age of good faith and hard fighting of liberty or death!yea, and the age of newspapers and speeches in Britain, France, and Germany-the uncorrupted I mean (and the rest, you know, as mere sloughs, rather than a living and component part, need not be taken into the calculation)-were of the same opinion! A dream for Momus to wake out of with laughing! But enough! You are convinced on this point, at least you retract your objection. And now what else? Does my history require, in the way of correspondency, a time of wonders, a revolutionary period? Does it demand a nondescript age? Should it, above all (as I myself admit that it should), be laid in an age "without a name," and which, therefore, it will be charity in me to christen by the name of the Polypus? An age, where the inmost may be turned outside-and "Inside out and outside in," I at one time intended for the title of my history— where the very tails, inspired by the spirit of independence, shoot out heads of their own? (Thanks, with three times three, to Ellis and Trembley, the first historiographers of the Polypus |