name:
we put forth, lightly and negligently, those lesser matters which
opportunity hath not yet matured; we escape the nervous pains, the
literary perils of the hardier acknowledged. Only of this one thing be
sure; we--(no, I; why should unregal, unhierarchal I affect
pluralities?)--I hope to keep inviolate, as much when masked as when
avowed, the laws of truth, charity, sincerity, and honour; and,
although, among my many booklets, the grave and the gay will be found in
near approximation, I trust--will it offend any to tell them that I
pray?--to do no ill service at any time to the cause of that true
religion which resents not the neighbourhood of innocent cheerfulness. I
show you, friend, my honest mind.

I by itself, I; odious mono-literal; thinnest, feeblest, most
insignificant of letters, I dread your egotistic influence as my bane;
they will not suffer you, nor bear with a book so speckled with your
presence. Still, world, hear me; mercifully spare a poor grammarian the
penance of perpetual third persons; let an individual tender conscience
escape censure for using the true singular in preference to that
imposing lie, the plural. Suffer a humble unit to speak of himself as I,
and, once for all, let me permissively disclaim intentional self-conceit
in the needful usage of isolated I-ship.

These few preliminaries being settled, though I fear little to the
satisfaction of either party concerned, let us proceed--further to
preliminarize; for you will find, even to the end, as you may have found
out already from the beginning, that your white knight is mounted rather
on an ambling preambling palfrey, than on any determinate charger;
curveting and prancing, and rambling and scrambling at his own unmanaged
will: scorning the bit and bridle, too hot to bear the spur, careless of
listing laws, and wishing rather playfully to show his paces, than to
tilt against a foe.

An author's mind, _qua_ author, is essentially a gossip; an oral,
ocular, imaginative, common-place book: a _pot pourri_ mixed from the
_hortus siccus_ of education, and the greener garden of internal thought
that springs in fresh verdure about the heart's own fountain; a compound
of many metals flowing from the mental crucible as one--perchance a base
alloy, perchance new, and precious, and beautiful as the fine brass of
Corinth; an accidental meeting in the same small chamber of many
spiritual essences that combine, as by magnetism into some strange a