pay for that kind of delight, is not, in all instances, called on to write, though there are, it is said, who, their spirits to cheer, slip in a new title-page three times a year, and in this way snuff up an imaginary savor of that sweetest of dishes, the popular favor, much as if a starved painter should fall to and treat the Ugolino inside to a picture of meat.

You remember (if not, pray turn backward and look) that, in writing the preface which ushered my book, I treated you, excellent Public, not merely with a cool disregard, but downright cavalierly. Now I would not take back the least thing I then said, though I thereby could butter both sides of my bread, for I never could see that an author owed aught to the people he solaced, diverted, or taught; and, as for mere fame, I have long ago learned that the persons by whom it is finally earned are those with whom your verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by the higher court sitting within.

say,

But I wander from what I intended to that you have, namely, shown such a liberal way of thinking, and so much æsthetic perception of anonymous worth in the handsome reception you gave to my book, spite of some private piques (having bought the first thousand in barely two weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of yours most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical section was shorter, by an inch and two tenths, or 'twixt that and a quarter.

matter what). Com, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews." So they both (as mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anony mous bays. Each, piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other's unbiased review, thinks - Here's pretty high praise, but no more than my due. Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, if asked, scarce a month since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public's critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when he said, that the Public sometimes hit the

truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down (by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and, while I am writing, -I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment be just on the brink of it, ybdostom, angry at being omitted, has begun a critique, pitied?*

Mo

am I not to be

Now I shall not crush them since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them, --no action of fire could You have watched a child playing-in make either them or their articles drier; those wondrous years when belief is not or waste time in putting them down bound to the eyes and the ears, and the I am thinking not their own self-inflation vision divine is so clear and unmarred, will keep them from sinking: for there's this contradiction about the whole bevy, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard! Give a knife and a shingle, he fits though without the least weight, they are out a fleet, and, on that little mud-puddle surdo fabulam narras, they are no more awfully heavy. No, my dear honest bore, over the street, his fancy, in purest good to me than a rat in the arras. I can walk faith, will make sail round the globe with a with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, puff of his breath for a gale, will visit in barely ten minutes all climes, and do the John, and feel nothing more than a halfor draw out the Lambish quintessence of Columbus-feat hundreds of times. Or, sup- comic sorrow, to think that they all will pose the young poet fresh stored with delights from that Bible of childhood, the be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on Arabian Nights, he will turn to a crony all but their half-dozen selves. Once snug the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by and cry, "Jack, let's play that I am a Genius! Jacky straightway makes Alad- in my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the din's lamp out of a stone, and, for hours, whole pack of them outside the door. they enjoy each his own supernatural With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away powers. This is all very pretty and pleas- to the black northern seas or barbaric ant, but then suppose our two urchins have Cathay; get fou with O'Shanter, and sober grown into men, and both have turned me then with that builder of brick-kiluish authors, -one says to his brother, "Let's play we're the American somethings or other, say Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no

* The wise Scandinavians probably called their bards by the queer-looking title of Scald, in a delicate way, as it were, just to hint to the world the hot water they always get into.

dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy | I might have forgiven, an o's being wry, as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax a limp in an e, or a cock in an i, but to tender, o'er Chapman grow brave; with have the sweet babe of my brain served in Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in pi! I am not queasy-stomached, but such Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; a Thyestean banquet as that was quite out with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; of the question. with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before, that marvel, a poet divine who can bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up her shield 'gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling and kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the mind. The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove of hemlocks, with moss on their stems, like plashes of sunlight the pond in the woods, where no foot but mine and the bittern's intrudes, where pitcher-plants purple and gentians hard by recall to September the blue of June's sky; these are all my kind neighbors, and leave me no wish to say aught to you all, my poor critics, but-pish! I've buried the hatchet: I'm twisting an allumette out of one of you now, and relighting my calumet. In your private capacities, come when you please, I will give you my hand and a fresh pipe

apiece.

As I ran through the leaves of my poor little book, to take a fond author's first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the errata, sprawled in as birds' tracks are in some kinds of strata (only these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir that a father had seen born well-featured and fair, turning suddenly wry-nosed, club-footed, squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, from a pride become an aversion,- my case was yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a change) in a verse,

In the edition now issued no pains are neglected, and my verses, as orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders remain of the Public's own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits of a dozen in one, has been, as I hear, by some persons applied to a good friend of mine, whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking together, would not be my way. I can hardly tell whether a question will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune agree, but meanwhile my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though not the best judge on earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying and why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not found so rife I can easily smother my love for them, whether on my side or t'other.

For my other anonymi, you may be sure that I know what is meant by a caricature, and what by a portrait. There are those who think it is capital fun to be spattering their ink on quiet, unquarrelsome folk, but the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they As for me I respect neither women nor see something savage and horrible in it. men for their gender, nor own any sex in causeless unfriends that, as far as I know, a pen. I choose just to hint to some there are always two ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff, and two parties also to every good laugh.

A FABLE FOR CRITICS.

PHOEBUS, sitting one day in a laurel | Not to say that the thought would for

Well, here, after all the bad rhyme | A
I've been spinning,

I've got back at last to my story's begin-
ning:
Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of
his mistress,

As dull as a volume of old Chester mys-
teries,

Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories,

We read of his verses- the Oracles, namely,

(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely,

For one might bet safely whatever he
has to risk,

They were laid at his door by some
ancient Miss Asterisk,
And so dull that the men who retailed
them out-doors

Got the ill name of augurs, because
they were bores, —)

First, he mused what the animal sub-
stance or herb is

Would induce a mustache, for you
know he's imberbis ;
Then he shuddered to think how his
youthful position

Was assailed by the age of his son the
physician;

At some poems he glanced, had been

sent to him lately, And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly; "Mehercle! I'd make such proceeding felonious, Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?

Look well to your seat, 't is like taking an airing

On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;

It leads one, 't is true, through the primitive forest,

Grand natural features, but then one

has no rest;

You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance,

When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,

Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?"

- Here the laurel-leaves murmured the

name of poor Daphne.

But,

She

terrible thing to be pestered with

poets!

alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good,

never will cry till she's out of the wood!

What would n't I give if I never had known of her?

'T were a kind of relief had I something to groan over :

If I

I

had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over,

might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,

And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her.

One

needs something

to begin on,

tangible, though,

loom, as it were, for the fancy to

spin on ;

A
What boots all your grist? it can never
be ground

Till a breeze makes the arms of the
windmill go round,

(Or, if 't is a water-mill, alter the metaphor,

And

say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore,

Or lug in some stuff about water "so dreamily,"

It is not a metaphor, though, 't is a simile);

A lily, perhaps, would set my mill a-going,

For just at this season, I think, they are blowing.

Here, somebody, fetch one; not very

far hence

They're in bloom by the score, 't is but climbing a fence;

There's a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his

Whole garden, from one end to t' other, with lilies;

A very good plan, were it not for satiety,

One

longs for a weed here and there, for variety; Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise,

Which is seen through at once, if love
give a man eyes."

Now there happened to be among
Phoebus's followers,

"O, weep with me, Daphne," he A gentleman, one of the omnivorous