espected family, I shall take occasion
(dropping all metaphor) to intimate a doubt, whether, should these papers
be collected and republished, I shall not wholly recast the Initial
Chapters in which the Caxtons have been permitted to re-appear. They
assure me, themselves, that they feel a bashful apprehension lest they may
be accused of having thrust irrelevant noses into affairs which by no
means belong to them--an impertinence which, being a peculiarly shy race,
they have carefully shunned in the previous course of their innocent and
segregated existence. Indeed, there is some cause for that alarm, seeing
that not long since in a journal professing to be critical, this _My
Novel_; _or_, _Varieties in English Life_, was misnamed and insulted as "a
Continuation of _The Caxtons_," with which biographical work it has no
more to do (save in the aforesaid introductions to previous Books in the
present diversified and compendious narrative) than I with Hecuba, or
Hecuba with me. Reserving the doubt herein suggested for maturer
deliberation, I proceed with my new Initial Chapter. And I shall stint the
matter therein contained to a brief comment upon PUBLIC LIFE.

Were you ever in public life, my dear reader? I don't mean, by that
question, to ask whether you were ever Lord-Chancellor, Prime-Minister,
Leader of the Opposition, or even a member of the House of Commons. An
author hopes to find readers far beyond that very egregious but very
limited segment of the Great Circle. Were you ever a busy man in your
vestry, active in a municipal corporation, one of a committee for
furthering the interests of an enlightened candidate for your native
burgh, town, or shire?--in a word, did you ever resign your private
comforts as men in order to share the public troubles of mankind? If ever
you have so far departed from the Lucretian philosophy, just look back--was
it life at all that you lived?--were you an individual distinct existence--a
passenger in the railway?--or were you merely an indistinct portion of that
common flame which heated the boiler and generated the steam that set off
the monster train?--very hot, very active, very useful, no doubt; but all
your identity fused in flame, and all your forces vanishing in gas.

And you think the people in the railway carriages care for you?--do you
think that the gentleman in the worsted wrapper is saying to his neighbor
with the striped rug on his comfortable knees, "How grateful we ought