d the honour
of receiving his education, there used to be administered to the boys a
certain cough-medicine, which was so excessively agreeable that all the
lads longed to have colds in order to partake of the remedy. Some of our
popular novelists have compounded their drugs in a similar way, and
made them so palatable that a public, once healthy and honest, has been
well-nigh poisoned by their wares. Solomons defies anyone to say the
like of himself--that his doses have been as pleasant as champagne, and
his pills as sweet as barley-sugar;--it has been his attempt to make
vice to appear entirely vicious; and in those instances where he hath
occasionally introduced something like virtue, to make the sham as
evident as possible, and not allow the meanest capacity a single chance
to mistake it.

And what has been the consequence? That wholesome nausea which it has
been his good fortune to create wherever he has been allowed to practise
in his humble circle.

Has anyone thrown away a halfpennyworth of sympathy upon any person
mentioned in this history? Surely no. But abler and more famous men than
Solomons have taken a different plan; and it becomes every man in his
vocation to cry out against such, and expose their errors as best he
may.

Labouring under such ideas, Mr. Isaac Solomons, junior, produced the
romance of Mrs. Cat, and confesses himself completely happy to have
brought it to a conclusion. His poem may be dull--ay, and probably
is. The great Blackmore, the great Dennis, the great Sprat, the great
Pomfret, not to mention great men of our own time--have they not also
been dull, and had pretty reputations too? Be it granted Solomons IS
dull; but don't attack his morality; he humbly submits that, in his
poem, no man shall mistake virtue for vice, no man shall allow a single
sentiment of pity or admiration to enter his bosom for any character of
the piece: it being, from beginning to end, a scene of unmixed rascality
performed by persons who never deviate into good feeling. And although
he doth not pretend to equal the great modern authors, whom he hath
mentioned, in wit or descriptive power; yet, in the point of moral, he
meekly believes that he has been their superior; feeling the greatest
disgust for the characters he describes, and using his humble endeavour
to cause the public also to hate them.

Horsemonger Lane: January 1840.

End of Project Gutenberg's Catherine: A Story, by William Makepeace T