ght. I could mention many
proofs of this belief in my non-existence: here is one; a daughter of
mine is asked lately by an eminent person if she is a descendant of the
celebrated Elizabethan author? and when that individual in passing round
the room came near to the Professor, and was introduced to him as her
father, the man could scarcely be brought to believe that his
long-departed book friend was positively alive before him. The Professor
looked as if he had seen a ghost.

* * * * *

Throughout this volume I wish my courteous readers to bear in mind that
the writer excludes from it as much as possible the strictly private and
personal element; it is intended to be mainly authorial or on matters
therewith connected. Moreover, if they will considerately take into
account that as a youth and until middle age I was, from the
speech-impediment since overcome, isolated from the gaieties of society,
as also that I religiously abstained from theatricals at a time before
Macready, who has since purified them into a very fair school of
morals,--to say less of having been engaged in marriage from seventeen
to twenty-five,--I can have (for example) no love adventures to offer
for amusement, nor any dramatic anecdotes such as Ruskin might supply.
The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is full of entertaining and
highly coloured incidents which could not be possible to one rather of
the Huguenot stamp than that of the Cavalier, and so I cannot compete
therewith as to any of the spicier records of hot youth: for which
indeed let me be thankful.

If then my reader finds me less lively than he had--shall I say
uncharitably?--hoped for, let him take into account that, to quote the
splendid but sensuous phrase of Swinburne, I have always been stupidly
prone to prefer "the lilies and languors of virtue" to "the roses and
raptures of vice."

I will now proceed with the self-imposed duty of recording my authorial
performances.

CHAPTER XIII.

A MODERN PYRAMID.

In 1839, Rickerby was again my publisher; the new book being "A Modern
Pyramid; to Commemorate a Septuagint of Worthies." In this volume,
commencing with Abel, and ending with Felix Neff, I have greeted both in
verse and prose threescore and ten of the Excellent of the earth.
Probably the best thing in it is the "Vision Introductory;" and, as the
book has been long out of print, I will produce it here as an
interesting flight of fanc