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SALAD FOR THE SOCIAL:

BY THE AUTHOR OF

'SALAD FOR THE SOLITARY."

Some coarse, cold salad is before thee set;
Fall on."

BEN JONSON.

"A dinner of fragments is often said to be the best dinner; so there are
few minds but might furnish some instruction and entertainment of their
scraps, their odds and ends of thoughts. They who cannot weave a uniform
web, may at least produce a piece of patchwork."

GUESSES AT TRUTH.

"To the man of robust and healthy intellect, who gathers the harvest of
literature into his barn, thrashes the straw, winnows the grain, grinds it in
his own mill, bakes it in his own oven, and then eats the true bread of
knowledge, we bid a cordial welcome."

SOUTHEY'S DOCTOR.

LONDON:

RICHARD BENTLEY, 8, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,

Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.

1856.

270. b.150.

LONDON:

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

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INTRODUCTORY.

"I WOULD go fifty miles on foot, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author's hands -be pleased, he knows not why, and cares not wherefore."

STERNE.

SOUTHEY remarks, that there are some persons who are willing to be pleased, and thankful for being pleased, without thinking it necessary that they should be able to parse their pleasure, like a lesson, or give a rule or reason why they are pleased. It is the aim and design of the following pages to put the reader in this precise condition; believing, with Sydney Smith, "that all mankind are happier for having been happy; so that if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it."

Old books by great authors are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more. When in any fragrant, scarce old tome the bookworm discovers a sentence or an illustration that does his own heart good, he should hasten to give it currency. Most readers, readers con amore, have some snug little corner in the storehouse of memory, in which they treasure up choice passages of their favourite authors. It requires more than a mental process to reduce such a heterogeneous collection to something like order. The present Volume, with its antecedent, originated in some such an attempt. These desultory chapters are the fruitage of many pleasant, recreative hours spent in the high

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