in its circulation. The countenance,
which beams with complacency on receiving a guest to enliven a dull
residence, in a desolate neighbourhood, is oftentimes overcharged with
sadness, or collapses into rigidity, if the same guest should come
under recognizance in a populous city. When I write "Instructions for
an Author on his travels," I will advise a measured civility and a
constrained homage:--to criticise fearlessly, and to praise sparingly.
There are hearts too obtuse for the operations of gratitude. The
Scotch have behaved worthy of the inhabitants of the "land of cakes."
In spirit I am ever present with them, and rambling 'midst their
mountains and passes. If an Author may criticise his own works, I
should say that the preface to the Scotch Tour is the best piece of
composition of which I have been ever guilty.

How little are people aware of the pleasure they sometimes
unconsciously afford! When Mr. James Bohn, the publisher of the Scotch
Tour, placed me, one day, accidentally, opposite a long list of
splendidly bound books, and asked me "if I were acquainted with their
author?" I could not help inwardly exclaiming ... "NON OMNIS
MORIAR!"[473] I am too poor to present them to my "Sovereign Mistress,
the Queen Victoria;" but I _did_ present her Majesty, in person, with
a magnificently bound copy of the _Scotch Tour_; of which the
acceptance was never acknowledged from the royal quarter; simply
because, according to an etiquette which seems to me to be utterly
incomprehensible, books presented _in person_ are not acknowledged by
the Donee. I will not presume to quarrel with what I do not exactly
understand; but I will be free to confess that, had I been _aware_ of
this mystery, I should have told her Majesty, on presenting the
volume, that "I had the greater pleasure in making the offering, as
her illustrious Father had been among the earliest and warmest patrons
of my book-career; and that the work in question contained no
faithless account of one of the most interesting portions of her
dominions." This copy for the Queen had a special vellum page, on
which the Dedication, or Inscription, was printed in letters of gold.

[Footnote 473: This magnificent set of books, not _all_ upon
large paper, was valued at L84. It has been since sold to
Lord Bradford.]

At length we approach the once far-famed ATTICUS: the once illustrious
RICHARD HEBER, Esq., the self-ejected member of the University of
Oxfo