subject from all sides, we may have had some such _dernier_ purpose in
view. Political tastes are so varied that they can rarely be consulted
with success in a literary venture of reasonable magnitude, and where this
is true, it can be no more than fair to ignore them.

The work has many imperfections, as all can see--imperfections which
cannot be cured, and hence resemble it so much to human nature that we
must be pardoned for alleging that circumstance as the chief of two
reasons (both disconnected from those philoprogenitive impulsions that we
sometimes hear of from mawkish writers) for holding it in esteem. The sun
has spots, and we once knew a critic whose grammar was execrable. Lest,
however, some persons should officiously infer that we mean to wrong a
very excellent class of people, we will state that the analogy between the
last-named objects does not cease here.

What we wish to say most in this concluding chapter, is that the work was
not written to invite anybody's pique, nor to avoid it, nor to flatter
anybody, nor to parody anybody, but to gratify a whim, and as it has been
announced that there would be no explanation, and the completion of the
task leaves us in a mood for conundrums, we shall not interfere with the
reader's prerogative of guessing its import. But it was a mere whim, and
now that it has been gratified, we feel better--vastly improved, in
fact--so much improved that, in order to reach a superlative that will fit
our case precisely, we find it necessary to go beyond the dictionary
standard, and adopt the beautiful newsboy euphemism, hunky-dory. And then,
too, the author has that self gratulation which could not fail to proceed
from the knowledge that, from the beginning, a brave effort was maintained
to avoid that notoriety which comes of even remote connection with such
labor as he has performed,--and which must have succeeded but for his
inadvertence in confiding the secret to one female acquaintance instead of
fifty. Now that the mischief has been performed, his partiality for the
sex leads him to say that he will be more thoughtful in the future.

An old friend, whose sagacity regarding such subjects is approved, has
informed us confidentially that the book will sell, and if it sells, can
it be anybody's business whether it is read or not? After revolving this
query in our mind, and inducing a fair analogy between what would be just
to the outside world and profitable to ourselves, we a