bjects, had
it come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another false
start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been
self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the
flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into
the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all
those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another. Such a
subject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame,
besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, _if_ only one could manage it
well enough to be named in the same breath with Campbell, Rogers, and
Akenside. Well, it was a mental mortification; for I am full of moral
land-marks, and would not (poetically speaking) for the world move
rooted termini into other people's grounds. Whether the field has been
well or ill preoccupied I wot not, having neither seen the poem nor
heard its maker's name: therefore shall my charity hope well of it, and
mourn over the unmerited oblivion which generally greets modern
poetry--yea, upon its very natal-day. Nevertheless, as an upright man
will never wish barefacedly to steal from others, so does he determine
at all times to claim independently his own: to be robbed, and not
resent it (I speak foolishly), is the next mean thing after pilfering
itself; and rash will be thy daring, O literary larcener! (can such
things be?) if thou art found unpermissively appropriating even such
sorry spoil as these poor seedlings of still possible volumes.

Prose and verse are allowed to have some disguising differences, at
least in termination; and as we must not--so hints the public
taste--spoil honest prose, bad as it may be, with too much intermixture
of worse verse, it will be prudent in me to be sparing of my specimens.
Yet, who will endure so _staccato_ a page of jerking sentences as a
confirmed synopsis?--"Well, any thing rather than poetry," says the
world; so, for better or worse, I will jot down prosaically a few of my
all but impromptu imaginings on Home.

After some general propositions, it would be proper to indulge the
orthodoxy of invocation; not to Muses, however, but to the subject
itself; for now-a-days, in lieu of definite deities, our worship has
regard to theories, doctrines, and other abstract idolisms: and
thereafter should follow at length an historical retrospect of domestic
life, from the savage to the transition states of hunters and warriors;
Nimr