rts of our holy and beautiful House.

Suffer thus far, clerical and lay, these crude hints: in all things have
I studied brevity, throughout this little bookful; therefore are you
spared a perusal of my reasons, and so be indulgent for their absence. I
"touch your ears" but lightly; be you for charity, as in old Rome, my
favourable witnesses.

* * * * *

My before-mentioned Censor of the press had a very considerable mind to
dock all mention of the following intended _brochure_. But I answered,
Really, Mr. Judgment, (better or worse, as occasion may register your
Agnomen,) you must not weigh trifles in gold-assaying scales; be not so
particular as to the polish of a thumb-nail; endure a little incoherent
pastime; count not the several stems of hay, straw, stubble--but suffer
them to be pitch-forked _en masse_, and unconsidered: it is their
privilege, in common with that of certain others--lightnesses that froth
upon the surface of society. Moreover, let me remind your worship's
classicality that no one of mortals is sapient at all times. Item, that
if friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of the
antiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine hot. So give
the colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that this same
colt, as straying without a responsible rider, is indeed liable to be
impounded by any who can catch him; but still, if he be found to have
done great damage to his master's character, or to a neighbour's fences,
the estray shall rather be abandoned than acknowledged. Let then this
unequal work, this ill-assorted bundle of dry book-plants, this
undirected parcel of literary stuff, be accounted much in the same
situation as that of the wanton caitiff-colt, so likely to bait a-pound,
and afterwards to be sold for payment of expenses, in true bailiff-sense
of justice. And let thus much serve as discursive prolegomena to a
notion, scarcely worth recording, but for the wonder, that no professed
writer (at least to my small knowledge) has entered on so common-sense a
field. Paris, I remember, some years ago was inundated with copies of a
treatise on the important art of tying the cravat; every shop-window
displayed the mystic diagrams, and every stiff neck proclaimed its
popularity. This was my yesterday's-conceived precedent for entertaining
the bright hope of illuminating London on the subject of shaving:

ANTI-XURION;

A CRUSADE AGAINST R