have since learned is Cervantes. The _Sunday Times_ finds 'Proverbial
Philosophy' 'very like Dodsley's "Economy of Human Life,"' but I may say
I never saw that neat little book of maxims till my brother Dan gave it
to me fourteen years after my Philosophy was public property; I am also
by this critic supposed to have 'imitated the Gulistan or Bostan of
Saadi,'--whereof I need not profess my total ignorance: however, the
writer kindly says of me, 'if he fail to make himself heard, the fault
will be rather in the public than in him.' The _Metropolitan_ propounds
that 'a book like this would make a man's fortune in the East, but we
are afraid that philosophy in proverbs has no great chance in the West:
we should recommend the author to get it translated into Arabic.'" [I
have since heard that some of it has been.] Let this be enough as to
those first fruits of criticism, which might be extended to satiety; but
I decline to become "inebriated with the exuberance of my own
verbosity," as Beaconsfield has it about Gladstone.

To carry on the story of my old book, its second series was due to
Harrison Ainsworth, at all events instrumentally. For, just as he was
establishing his special magazine, he asked me to help him with a
contribution in the style of that then new popularity, my Proverbs. This
I sturdily declined; for in my young days, it was thought
ungentlemanlike to write in magazines, though dukes, archbishops, and
premiers do so now: even authorship for money was thought vulgar: but,
when there greeted me at home a parcel of well-bound books as a gift
from the author, being all that were then extant of Ainsworth's, I was
so taken aback by his kindly munificence that I somewhat penitentially
responded thereto by an impromptu chapter on "Gifts," wherewith I made
the quarrel up and he was delighted: one or two others following.
However, I was too quick and too impatient to wait for piecemeal
publication month by month,--seeing I soon had my second series ready:
and so, leaving Rickerby as an unfruitful publisher (though, as will
soon appear, he produced other books for me) I went to Hatchards; with
whom I had a long and prosperous career--receiving annually from L500 to
L800 a year, and in the aggregate having benefited both them and
myself--for we shared equally--by something like, L10,000 a piece. But
in the course of time, the old grandfather and the father of the house,
excellent men both, went severally to the Bette