EARCHES

ARE INSCRIBED;

AS A SLIGHT MEMORIAL OF FRIENDSHIP

AND

A GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT

TO

A LOVER OF LITERATURE.

* * * * *

PREFACE.

Of a work which long has been placed on that shelf which Voltaire has
discriminated as _la Bibliotheque du Monde_, it is never mistimed for
the author to offer the many, who are familiar with its pages, a settled
conception of its design.

The "Curiosities of Literature," commenced fifty years since, have been
composed at various periods, and necessarily partake of those successive
characters which mark the eras of the intellectual habits of the writer.

In my youth, the taste for modern literary history was only of recent
date. The first elegant scholar who opened a richer vein in the mine of
MODERN LITERATURE was JOSEPH WARTON;--he had a fragmentary mind, and he
was a rambler in discursive criticism. Dr. JOHNSON was a famished man
for anecdotical literature, and sorely complained of the penury of our
literary history.

THOMAS WARTON must have found, in the taste of his brother and the
energy of Johnson, his happiest prototypes; but he had too frequently to
wrestle with barren antiquarianism, and was lost to us at the gates of
that paradise which had hardly opened on him. These were the true
founders of that more elegant literature in which France had preceded
us. These works created a more pleasing species of erudition:--the age
of taste and genius had come; but the age of philosophical thinking was
yet but in its dawn.

Among my earliest literary friends, two distinguished themselves by
their anecdotical literature: JAMES PETIT ANDREWS, by his "Anecdotes,
Ancient and Modern," and WILLIAM SEWARD, by his "Anecdotes of
Distinguished Persons." These volumes were favourably received, and to
such a degree, that a wit of that day, and who is still a wit as well as
a poet, considered that we were far gone in our "Anecdotage."

I was a guest at the banquet, but it seemed to me to consist wholly of
confectionery. I conceived the idea of a collection of a different
complexion. I was then seeking for instruction in modern literature; and
our language afforded no collection of the _res litterariae_. In the
diversified volumes of the French _Ana_, I found, among the best,
materials to work on. I improved my subjects with as much of our own
literature as my limited studies afforded. The volume, without a name,
wa