THEIR CARDS, without further DELAY, to my friend, G. P. PUTNAM, Esquire, in Broadway, where a LIST will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour of receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time (that is, if their names can be twisted in rhyme), I will honestly give each his PROPER POSITION, at the rate of ONE AUTHOR to each NEW EDITION. Thus a PREMIUM is offered sufficiently HIGH (as the magazines say when they tell their best lie), to induce bards to CLUB their resources and buy the balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly been run through the mill.

One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read books with something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the country, perhaps, there are two, including myself, gentle reader, and you. All the characters sketched in this slight jeu d'esprit, though, it may be, they seem, here and there, rather free, and drawn from a Mephistophelian standpoint, are meant to be faithful, and that is the grand point, and none but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells you, without any subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes' tub.

LESSON CLX.

A Preliminary Note to the Second Edition,* Though it well may be reckoned, of all composition, the species at once, most delightful and healthy, is a thing which an author, unless he be wealthy and willing to pay for that kind of delight, is not, in all instances, called on to write. Though there are, it is said, who, their spirits to cheer, slip in a new title-page three times a year, and in this way snuff up an imaginary savor of that sweetest of dishes, the popular favor, much as if a starved painter should fall to and treat the Ugolino † inside to a picture of meat.

You remember (if not, pray turn over and look) that, in writing the preface which ushered my book, I treated you, excellent Public, not merely with a cool disregard, but downright cavalierly. Now I would not take back the least thing I then said, though I thereby could butter both sides of my bread; for I never could see that an author owed aught to the people he solaced, diverted or taught; and, as for mere fame, I have long ago learned that the persons by whom it is finally earned, are those with whom your verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by the higher court sitting within.

But I wander from what I intended to say—that you have, namely, shown such a liberal way of thinking, and so much æsthetic perception of anonymous worth in the handsome reception, you gave to my book, spite of some private piques (having bought the two thousand in barely two weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of yours most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical section was shorter, by an inch and two-tenths, or 'twixt that and a quarter.

You have watched a child playing-in those wondrous years when belief is not bound to the eyes and the ears, and the vision divine is so clear and unmarred, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? Give a knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little mudpuddle over the street, his invention, in purest good faith, will make sail round the globe, with a puff of his breath for a gale, will visit, in barely ten minutes, all climes, and find north-western passages hundreds of times. Or, suppose the young poet fresh stored with delights from that Bible of childhood, the Arabian Nights, he will turn to a crony and cry, "Jack, let's play that I am a Genius!" Jacky straightway makes Aladdin's lamp out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each his own supernatural powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, but then suppose cur two urchins have grown into men, and both turned authors,—one says to his brother, "Let's play we're the Ameri

can something or other (only let them be big enough, no matter what*). Come, you shall be Goethet or Pope, which you choose; I'll be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews." So they both (as mere strangers), before many days. send each other a cord of anonymous bays. Each, in piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his friend can be made to believe; each, in reading the other's unbiased review, thinks Here's pretty high praise, but no more than is true. Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, if asked, scarce a month since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public's critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when he said, that the Public sometimes hit the truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty good health and condition, and yet, since I put forth my primary edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up, and put down (by Smith, with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and, while I am writing- I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment be just on the brink of it - Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has begun a critique, am I not to be pitied ?‡

Now I shall not crush them, since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them, -no action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; nor waste time in putting them down

-I am thinking not their own self-inflation will keep them from sinking; for there's this contradiction about the whole

* That the young reader may not long grope, in the dark, for a line to match this parenthetic remark, I will tell him at once that, in vain will he look for it. If he finds it, he 'll have to go out of the book for it.-J. P. † Pron. Gay'-tā-th, as in Thomas.

The wise Scandinavians probably called their bards by the queerlooking title of Scald, in a delicate way, as it were, just to hint to the world the hot water they always get into.

bevy, though without the least weight, they are awfully heavy. No, my dear honest bore, surdo fabulum narras,* they are no more to me than a rat in the arras. I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half-comic sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half-dozen selves. Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the whole pack of them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get fou with O'Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o'er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version), Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before, — that divinely-inspired, wise, deep, tender, grand, bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, nature holds up her shield 'gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling and kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the mind. The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove of hemlocks, with moss on their stems. like splashes of sunlight; the pond in the woods, where no foot but mine and the bittern's intrudes; these are all my kind neighbors, and leave me no wish to say aught to you all, my poor critics, but—pish! I have buried the hatchet; I am twisting an allumette out of one of you now, and relighting

* This proverb is Latin, my friends, and for fear it will not be understood, here's the English- or near it :- -"You are telling your tale to camar that can't hear it." -J. P.

my calumet. In your private capacities, come when you please, I will give you my hand and a fresh pipe apiece.

As I ran through the leaves of my poor little book, to take a fond author's first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the errata, sprawled in as birds' tracks are in some kind of strata (only these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir, that a father had seen born well-featured and fair. turning suddenly wry-nosed, club-footed, squint-eyed, hairlipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, from a pride become an aversion, my case was yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a change) in a verse, I might have forgiven, an o's being wry, a botch in an e or a cock in an i,- but to have the sweet babe of my brain served in pi! I am not greasy-stomached, but such a Thyestean banquet as that was quite out of the question.

In the edition now issued, no pains are neglected, and my verses, as orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders remain of the public's own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a character drawn in pure fun, and condensing the traits of a dozen in one, has been, as I hear, by some persons applied to a good friend of mine, whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking together, would not be my way. I can hardly teil whether a question will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune agree, but meanwhile my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though not the best judge upon earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying and why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not found so rife I can easily smother my love for them, whether on my side or t' other.

For my other anonymi, you may be sure I know what is meant by a caricature, and what by a portrait. There are those who think it is capital fun to be spattering their ink on quiet unquarrelsome folk, but the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they see something savage and