nd
novel substance; a mixture of appropriations, made lawfully a man's own
by labour spent upon the raw material; corn-clad Egypt rescued from a
burnt Africa by the richness of a swelling Nile--the black forest of
pines changed into a laughing vineyard by skill, enterprise, and
culture--the mechanism of Frankenstein's man of clay, energized at
length by the spark Promethean.

And now, reader, do you begin to comprehend me, and my title? '_An
Author's Mind_' is first in the field, and, as with root and fruit, must
take precedence of its booklets; bear then, if you will, with this
desultory anatomization of itself yet a little longer, and then in good
time and moderate space you will come to the rudiments--bones, so to
speak--of its many members, the frame-work on which its nerves and
muscles hang, the names of its unborn children, the title-pages of its
own unprinted books.

Philosophers and fools, separately or together, as the case may be--for
folly and philosophy not seldom form one Janus-head, and Minerva's bird
seems sometimes not ill-fitted with the face of Momus--these and their
thousand intermediates have tried in all ages to define that quaint
enigma, Man: and I wot not that any pundit of literature hath better
succeeded than the nameless, fameless man--or woman, was it?--or haply
some innocent shrewd child--who whilom did enunciate that MAN IS A
WRITING ANIMAL: true as arithmetic, clear as the sunbeam, rational
as Euclid, a discerning, just, exclusive definition. That he is "capable
of laughter," is well enough even for thy deathless fame, O Stagyrite!
but equally (so Buffon testifies) are apes and monkeys, horses and
hyenas; whether perforce of tickling or sympathy, or native notions of
the humorous, we will not stop to contend. That he actually is "an
animal whose best wisdom is laughter," hath but little reason in it,
Democrite, seeing there are such obvious anomalies among men as suicidal
jesters and cachinating idiots; nevertheless, my punster of Abdera, thy
whimsical fancy, surviving the wreck of dynasties, and too light to sink
in the billows of oblivion, is now become the popular thought, the
fashionable dress of heretofore moping wisdom: crow, an thou wilt, jolly
old chanticleer, but remember thee thou crowest on a dunghill; man is
not a mere merry-andrew. Neither is he exclusively "a weeping animal,"
lugubrious Heraclite, no better definer than thy laughter-loving foe:
that man weeps, or ought to we