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intervals, and as it were in serial sections, instalments of completed work which has been the occupation of long years. In the present instance, an additional incentive to speed rather than delay, is the precarious state of the writer's health; of a kind to make him wishful to see through the press as much as he can of what is ready for it.

That his books, such as they are, find a sale, such as it is, he freely owns to be to him at once a surprise and a solace.

A surprise; because no one can well recognize more keenly the extent of their demerits in general, and the conspicuous absence in them of attractiveness for the

reading world" in particular. If any one thing more than another conciliates him towards them, it is what to censors from without is a ground of objection, that there is so little of his own in them.

A solace; because that state of health to which allusion has been made, and which enforces the exceptional (inexperience of constraint might write it exceptionable) life of a recluse, makes this mode of employment his only available resource. The plea is of course invalid, in the way of arresting judgment,

or mitigating its sentence, on the part of those predisposed to condemn; but on his part it goes some way towards confirming him in an apparent vocation, and so far reconciling him to his lot. From the same cause, what he writes is signally deficient in that freshness and force of composition, and that breadth and depth of research, which a hale student, not confined for the most part to his own room, and limited altogether to his own bookshelves, might offer. As Goldsmith's sage connoisseur said the painter would have succeeded better had he taken more pains, so might this penman have done had he taken fewer pills. What pains he has taken, a charitable reader will perhaps give him credit for, simply on credit; the proof is hardly patent on these pages, unless it be to stamp him, in the oldfashioned phrase, a very " painful" writer.

Book-maker is the term that figures on the titlepage, and, as distinguished from Author, it is by many, and often if not always rightly, considered of distinctively bad repute. Be that as it may, it is only too distinctively the designation of the present compiler. And he will merely add that his obligations to authorities are so many, that the shortest, if not the

handsomest, way of expressing them, is to comprise in the avowal the entire list of literary names which pretty well make up the Index to this volume. In it the Proper Names of his creditors are properly named by a debtor of unlimited liability.

F. J.

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