et this dilemma therefore, it
seems that the leader said to his second--'Write me a heap of long
speeches upon astrology and Welch genealogy; write me another heap on
English politics: I have some people in my novel (Sir Morgan and
Dulberry) upon whom I can hang them: I shall take care to leave hooks
in plenty, do you leave eyes; and with these hooks and eyes we can
fasten your speeches on my men, when both are finished.' This I
conceive to have been the pleasant arrangement upon which 'Walladmor'
was worked so as to fetch up the ground before the fair began; and thus
ingeniously were two men's labors dovetailed into one novel: "aliter
non fit, Avite, liber." When the rest of the rigging was complete,
the politics, genealogy, and astrology, were mounted as "royals" and
"sky-scrapers;" and the ship weighed from Berlin for Leipsic under a
press of sail.

Now, as to these long speeches and Welch conversations, I know not who
is their author; but in conscience I cannot pay him a less compliment
than this--that,

"From Cain the first man-child
To him that did but yesterday suspire,"[3]

there has not been such another idiot. All attempt at mending them, or
transfusing any sense into their dry bones, was hopeless: translated
into English, bottled, and corked up, they would furnish _virus_
enough, if distributed by inoculation amongst the next three thousand
novels of the English press, to ruin the constitution of them all.

I know not whether, in thus accounting for my omissions, I shall be
thought pleading for my defects, or proclaiming my deserts. In the
German author it was a manifest act of pocket-picking to stuff his
novel with such insufferable rubbish. And it seemed to me that, by
translating it, I should make myself a party to his knavery as well as
to his dulness. However, if any man complains of this omission, for an
adequate "consideration" (as the lawyers say) I shall be happy to cart
the whole of it upon his premises--deliver it in choice English--and
shoot it into the coal-cellar or any more appropriate place.

Mean time for the _public_ use I have thought it as well to leave it
untranslated. And the reader now understands how the novel comes to be
cut down from a three-decker to a two-decker; and upon what argument I
pretend to have produced a 'silk purse.' For undoubtedly the difference
between Walladmor with and without the rubbish--political,
astrological, "and diabolical" (as Mrs. Malaprop