form the deformity
of manuscript into the well-proportioned elegance of print. But, this
much gained, our author would not yield to any argument we could urge
upon the next point, viz: leave to produce the volume, duly fathered
with his name. "Not he indeed; he loved quiet too well; he might, it was
true, secretly like the bantling, but cared not to acknowledge it before
a populous reading-world, every individual whereof esteems himself and
herself competent to criticize!" Mr. Publisher, deeply disinterested, of
course, bristled up at the notion of any thing anonymous; and the only
alternative remaining was the stale expedient of an editor; that editor,
in brief, to be none other than myself, a very palpable-obscure: and let
this excuse my name upon the title-page.

Now, as editor, I have had to do--what seems, by the way, to be regarded
by collective wisdom as the best thing possible--nothing: my author
would not suffer the change of a syllable, for all his seeming
carelessness about the THING, as he called it; so, I had no
more for my part than humbly to act the Helot, and try to set decently
upon the public tables a genuine mess of Spartan porridge.

M. F. T.

_Albury, Guildford._

AN AUTHOR'S MIND:

THE

BOOK OF TITLE-PAGES.

A RAMBLE.

In these days of universal knowledge, schoolmaster and scholars all
abroad together, quotation is voted pedantry, and to interpret is
accounted an impertinence; yet will I boldly proclaim, as a mere fact,
clear to the perceptions of all it may concern, "This book deserves
richly of the Sosii." And that for the best of reasons: it is not only a
book, but a book full of books; not merely a new book, but a
little-library of new books; thirty books in one, a very harvest of
epitomized authorship, the cream of a whole fairy dairy of quiescent
post-octavos. It is not--O, mark ye this, my Sosii, (and by the way,
gentle ladies, these were worshipful booksellers of old, the Murrays and
the Bentleys of imperial Rome,)--it is not the dull concreted elongation
of one isolated hackneyed idea--supposing in every work there _be one_,
a charitable hypothesis--wire-drawn, and coaxed, and hammered through
three regulation volumes; but the scarcely-more-than-hinted abstractions
of some forty thousand flitting notions--hasty, yet meditative Hamlets;
none of those lengthy, drawling emblems of Laertes--driven in flocks to
the net of the fowler, and penned with difficult compression