Mistress Fornarina: thirteen cards to a suit, and
thirteen to the dozen, are proverbially the correct thing; but, as in
regular succession I have come upon the king card, I am free to
confess--(pen, why will you repeat again such a foolish, stale
Joe-Millerism?)--the subject a dilemma. Natheless, my good nature shall
give a royal chance to criticism most malign: whether candour
acknowledge it or not, doubtless the author's mind reigns dominant in
the author's book; and, notwithstanding the self-silence of blind
Maeonides, (a right notable exception,) it holds good as a rule that the
majority of original writings, directly or indirectly, concern a man's
own self; his whims and his crotchets, his knowledge and his ignorance,
wisdom and folly, experiences and suspicions, therein find a place
prepared for them. Scott's life naturally produced his earlier novels;
in the '_Corsair_,' the '_Childe_,' and the '_Don_,' no one can mistake
the hero-author; Southey's works, Shelley's, and Wordsworth's, are full
of adventure, feeling, and fancy, personal to the writers, at least
equally with the sonnets of Petrarch or of Shakspeare. And as with
instances illustrious as those, so with all humbler followers, the
skiffs, pinnaces, and heavy barges in the wake of those gallant ships:
an author's library, and his friends, his hobbies and amusements,
business and pleasure, fears and wishes, accidents of life, and
qualities of soul, all mingle in his writings with a harmonizing
individuality; nay, the very countenance and hand-writing, alike with
choice of subject and style and method of their treatment, illustrate,
in one word, the author's mind. These things being so, what hinders it
from occupying, as in honesty it does, the king's place in this pack of
sonnets? Nevertheless, forasmuch as by such occupancy an ill-tempered
sarcasm might charge it with conceit; know then that my humbler meaning
here is to put it lowest and last, even in the place of wooden-spoon;
for this also (being mindful of the twelve apostle-spoons from old time
antecedent) is a legitimate thirteener: and so, while in extricating my
muse from the folly of serenading a non-existent king, I have candidly
avowed the general selfishness of printing, believe that, in this
avowal, I take the lowest seat, so well befitting one of whom it may
ungraciously be asked, Where do fools buy their logic?

List, then, oh list! while generically, not individually I claim for
authorshi