lever, many well-intended caterers to public
amusement, throng your ill-ordered ranks: still, there are numbered to
your shame as followers of the fool's-cap standard, the huge corrupting
mass of depraved moralists, meagre trash-inditers, treacherous
scandal-mongers, men about town who immortalize their shame, and the
dull, pernicious school of feather-brained Romancists: and take this
sentence for a true one, a _verum-dictum_. But enough, there are others,
and those not few, even far less veniable; ye priers into family
secrets--fawning, false guests at the great man's open house, eagerly
jotting down with paricidal pen the unguarded conversation of the
hospitable board--shame on your treason, on its wages, and its fame! ye
countless gatherers and disposers of other men's stuff; chiels amang us
takin' notes, an' faith, to prent 'em too, perpetually, without
mitigation or remorse; ye men of paste and scissors, who so often
falsely, feebly, faithlessly, and tastelessly are patching into a
Harlequin whole the _disjecta membra_ of some great hacked-up
reputation; can such as ye are tell me what it is to write? Writing is
the concreted fruit of thinking, the original expression of new
combinations of idea, the fresh chemical product of educational
compounds long simmering in the mind, the possession of a sixth sense,
distinguishing intelligence, and proclaiming it to the four winds;
writing is not labour, but ease; not care, but happiness; not the petty
pilferings of poverty, but the large overflowings of mental affluence;
it begs not on the highway, but gives great largess, like a king; it
preys not on a neighbour's wealth, but enriches him; it may light,
indeed, a lamp, at another's candle, but pays him back with brilliancy;
it may borrow fire from the common stock, but uses it for genial warmth
and noble hospitality.

Remember well, good critic, (for verily bad there be,) my purposes in
this odd volume--this queer, unsophisticate, uncultivated book: to empty
my mind, to clear my brain of cobwebs, to lift off my head a porters's
load of fancy articles; and as in a bottle of bad champaign, the first
glass, leaping out hurryskurry, at a railroad pace boiling a gallop,
carries off with it bits of cork and morsels of rosin, even such is the
first ebullition of my thoughts: take them for what they are worth, and
blame no one but your discontented self that they are no better. Do you
suppose, keen sir, that I am not quite self-