mysterious
practice of touching objects to baffle the evil chance. The miserable
detractor will, of course, instantly begin to rave about such a habit
being common--well and good; but was it ever before described in print,
or all connected with it dissected? He may then vociferate something
about Johnson having touched--the writer cares not whether Johnson--who,
by the by, during the last twenty or thirty years, owing to people having
become ultra Tory mad from reading Scott's novels and the _Quarterly
Review_, has been a mighty favourite, especially with some who were in
the habit of calling him a half-crazy old fool--touched, or whether he
did not; but he asks where did Johnson ever describe the feelings which
induced him to perform the magic touch, even supposing that he did
perform it? Again, the history gives an account of a certain book called
the 'Sleeping Bard,' the most remarkable prose work of the most difficult
language but one, of modern Europe; a book, for a notice of which, he
believes, one might turn over in vain the pages of any review printed in
England, or, indeed, elsewhere. So here are two facts, one literary and
the other physiological, for which any candid critic was bound to thank
the author, even as in 'The Romany Rye' there is a fact connected with
Iro Norman Myth, for the disclosing of which any person who pretends to
have a regard for literature is bound to thank him, namely, that the
mysterious Finn or Fingal of 'Ossian's Poems' is one and the same person
as the Sigurd Fofnisbane of the Edda and the Wilkina, and the Siegfried
Horn of the Lay of the Niebelungs.

The writer might here conclude, and, he believes, most triumphantly; as,
however, he is in the cue for writing, which he seldom is, he will for
his own gratification, and for the sake of others, dropping metaphors
about vipers and serpents, show up in particular two or three sets or
cliques of people, who, he is happy to say, have been particularly
virulent against him and his work, for nothing indeed could have given
him greater mortification than their praise.

In the first place, he wishes to dispose of certain individuals who call
themselves men of wit and fashion--about town--who he is told have abused
his book 'vaustly'--their own word. These people paint their cheeks,
wear white kid gloves, and dabble in literature, or what they conceive to
be literature. For abuse from such people, the writer was prepared.
Does anyone im