the expiration whereof it must be wound up again. I was fortunate
enough to discover this secret betimes, and I have since then known
several amiable and worthy persons to slip out of sight, from the lack
of it. There was Mr. ----, for example, whose comic articles shook the
fat sides of the nation for one summer, and whose pseudonyme was in
everybody's mouth. Alas! what he took for perpetual motion was but an
eight-day clock, and I need not call your attention to the present dead
and leaden stillness of its pendulum.

Although my earliest notoriety was achieved in very much the same
way,--that is, by a series of comic sketches, as many of my admirers no
doubt remember,--I soon perceived the unstable character of my
reputation. I was at the mercy of the next man who should succeed in
inventing a new slang, or a funnier way of spelling. These things, in
literature, are like "fancy drinks" among the profane. They tickle the
palates of the multitude for a while, but they don't wear like the plain
old beverages. I saw very plainly, that much more was to be gained, in
the long run, by planting myself--not with a sudden and startling jump,
but by a graceful, cautious pirouette--upon a basis of the Moral and the
Didactic. I should thus reach a class of slow, but very tough stomachs,
which would require ample time to assimilate the food I intended to
offer. If this were somewhat crude, that would be no objection whatever:
they always mistake their mental gripings for the process of digestion.
Why, bless your souls! I have known Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy" to
fill one of them to repletion, for the space of ten years!

I owe this resolution to my natural acuteness of perception, but my
success in carrying it into execution was partly the result of luck. The
field, now occupied by such a crowd, (I name no names,) was at that time
nearly clear; and I managed to shift my costume before the public fairly
knew what I was about. I found, indeed, that a combination of the two
styles enabled me to retain much of my old audience while acquiring the
new. It was like singing a hymn of serious admonition to a lively,
rattling tune. One is diverted: there is a present sense of fun, while a
gentle feeling of the grave truths inculcated lingers in one's mind
afterwards. The pious can find no fault with the matter, nor the profane
with the manner. Instead of approaching the moral consciousness of
one's readers with stern, lugubrious counte