n on the feet of our
personal consciousness and rescue us from the gregarious mock-modesty or
cowardice of that _we_ which shrills feebly throughout modern literature
like the shrieking of mice in the walls of a house that has passed its
prime. Having a few words to say to the many friends whom the 'Biglow
Papers' have won me, I shall accordingly take the freedom of the first
person singular of the personal pronoun. Let each of the good-natured
unknown who have cheered me by the written communication of their
sympathy look upon this Introduction as a private letter to himself.

When, more than twenty years ago, I wrote the first of the series, I had
no definite plan and no intention of ever writing another. Thinking the
Mexican war, as I think it still, a national crime committed in behoof
of Slavery, our common sin, and wishing to put the feeling of those who
thought as I did in a way that would tell, I imagined to myself such an
up-country man as I had often seen at antislavery gatherings capable of
district-school English, but always instinctively falling back into the
natural stronghold of his homely dialect when heated to the point of
self-forgetfulness. When I began to carry out my conception and to write
in my assumed character, I found myself in a strait between two perils.
On the one hand, I was in danger of being carried beyond the limit of my
own opinions, or at least of that temper with which every man should
speak his mind in print, and on the other I feared the risk of seeming
to vulgarize a deep and sacred conviction. I needed on occasion to rise
above the level of mere _patois_, and for this purpose conceived the
Rev. Mr. Wilbur, who should express the more cautious element of the New
England character and its pedantry, as Mr. Biglow should serve for its
homely common-sense vivified and heated by conscience. The parson was to
be the complement rather than the antithesis of his parishioner, and I
felt or fancied a certain humorous element in the real identity of the
two under a seeming incongruity. Mr. Wilbur's fondness for scraps of
Latin, though drawn from the life, I adopted deliberately to heighten
the contrast. Finding soon after that I needed some one as a mouth-piece
of the mere drollery, for I conceive that true humor is never divorced
from moral conviction, I invented Mr. Sawin for the clown of my little
puppet-show. I meant to embody in him that half-conscious _un_morality
which I had noticed as