to keep them till they should arrive by a regular perusal at the well-concealed catastrophe. It may be apprehended that persons of this temper, having in their composition much more of Eve's curiosity than of Job's patience, will regard with some displeasure a work like the present, of which the conclusion is not before them; and some, perhaps, may even be so unreasonable as to complain that they go through chapter after chapter without making any progress in the story. "What care the public,” says one of these readers, (for every reader is a self-constituted representative of that great invisible body,) "what do the public care for astrology and almanacs, and the influence of the tides upon diseases, and Mademoiselle des Roches's flea, and the Koran, and the chronology of this fellow's chapters, and Potteric Carr, and the corporation of Doncaster, and the theory of signatures, and the philosophy of the alchymists, and the devil knows what besides! What have these things to do with the subject of the book, and who would ever have looked for them in a novel!"

"A novel do you call it, Mr. Reader?"

"Yes, Mr. Author, what else should I call it? - It has been reviewed as a novel and advertised as a novel."

6

"I confess that in this very day's newspaper it is advertised in company with four new novels; the first in the list being Warleigh, or the Fatal Oak,' a Legend of Devon, by Mrs. Bray; the second, Dacre,' edited by the Countess of Morley; Mr. James's 'Life and Adventures of John Marston Hall' is the third; fourthly, comes the dear name of 'The Doctor;' and last in the list, 'The Court of Sigismund Augustus, or Poland in the Seventeenth Century.""

I present my compliments to each and all of the authoresses and authors with whom I find myself thus associated. At the same time I beg leave to apologize for this apparent intrusion into their company, and to assure them that the honour which I have thus received has been thrust upon me. Dr. Stegman had four patients whose disease was that they saw themselves double: " they perceived," says Mr. Turner, "another self, exterior to themselves!" I am not one of Dr. Stegman's patients; but I see myself double in a certain sense, and in that sense have another and distinct self-the one incog., the other out of cog. Out of cog. I should be as willing to meet the novelist of the Polish court, as any other unknown brother or sister of the quill. Out of cog. I should be glad to shake hands with Mr. James, converse with him about Charlemagne, and urge him to proceed with his French biography. Out of cog. I should have much pleasure in making my bow to Lady Morley or her editee. Out of cog. I should like to be introduced to Mrs. Bray in her own lovely land of Devon, and see the sweet innocent face of her humble friend Mary Colling. But without a

proper introduction I should never think of presenting myself to any of these persons; and having incog. the same sense of propriety as out of cog., I assure them that the manner in which my one self has been associated with them is not the act and deed of my other self, but that of Messrs. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, my very worthy and approved good publishers.

66

Why, Mr. Author, you do not mean to say that the book is not printed as a novel, does not appear as one, and is not intended to pass for one? Have you the face to deny it ?"

"Lecteur, mon ami, la demande est bien faite sans doute, et bien apparente; mais la response vous contentera, ou j'ai le sens malgallefretu!"

166

Lecteur, mon ami! an incog. has no face. But this I say in the face, or in all the faces of that public which has more heads than a Hindoo divinity, that the character and contents of the book were fairly, fully, carefully, and considerately denoted that is to say, notified or made known in the title page. Turn to it, I entreat you, sir! The first thing which you cannot but notice, is, that it is in motley. Ought you not to have inferred, concerning the author, that in his brain

he hath strange places cramm'd With observation, the which he vents In mangled forms?*

And if you could fail to perceive the conspicuous and capacious

&c.,

which in its omnisignificance may promise anything, and yet pledges the writer to nothing; and if you could also overlook the mysterious monograph

your attention was invited to all this by a sentence of Butler's, on the opposite page, so apposite that it seems as if he had

* Shakspeare.

written it with a second sight of the application thus to be made of it: There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what to expect from the one as the other.' This was the remark of one whose wisdom can never be obsolete; and whose wit, though much of it has become so, it will always be worth while for an Englishman to study and to understand."

Mr. D'Israeli has said that "the false idea which a title conveys is alike prejudicial to the author and the reader, and that titles are generally too prodigal of their promises;" but yet there is an error on the other hand to be avoided, for if they say too little they may fail of attracting notice. I bore in mind what Baillet says upon this subject, to which he has devoted a long chapter: "Le titre d'un livre doit être son abregé, et il en doit renfermer tout l'esprit, autant qu'il est possible. Il doit être le centre de toutes les paroles et de toutes les pensées du livre; de telle sorte qu'on n'y en puisse pas même trouver une qui n'y dit de la correspondance et du rapport." From this rule there has been no departure. Everything that is said of Peter Hopkins relates to the doctor prospectively, because he was the doctor's master; everything that may be said of, or from myself, relates to the doctor retrospectively, or reflectively, because he, though in a different sense, was mine: and everything that is said about anything else, relates to him collaterally, being either derivative or tributary, either divergent from the main subject, or convergent to its main end.

But albeit I claim the privilege of motley, and in right thereof

I must have liberty

Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please ;*

yet I have in no instance abused that charter, or visited any one too roughly. Nor will I ever do against the world what John Kinsaider did, in unseemly defiance-nor against the wind either; though it has been no maxim of mine, nor ever shall be, to turn with the tide, or go with the crowd, unless they are going my road, and there is no other way that I can take to escape the annoyance of their company.

"And is this any reason, Mr. Author, why you should get on as slowly with the story of your book as the House of Commons with the business of the nation, in the present reformed parliament, with Lord Althorpe for its leader?"

"Give me credit, sir, for a temper as imperturbably good as that which Lord Althorpe presents, like a sevenfold

* Shakspeare.

shield of lamb's wool, to cover him against all attacks, and I will not complain of the disparagement implied in your comparison."

"Your confounded good temper, Mr. Author, seems to pride itself upon trying experiments on the patience of your readers. Here I am, near the end of the last volume, and if any one asked me what the book is about, it would be impossible for me to answer the question. I have never been able to guess at the end of one chapter what was likely to be the subject of the next."

"Let me reply to that observation, sir, by an anecdote. A collector of scarce books was one day showing me his small but curious hoard: Have you ever seen a copy of this book?' he asked, with every rare volume that he put into my hands; and when my reply was that I had not, he always rejoined, with a look and tone of triumphant delight, 'I should have been exceedingly sorry if you had!'

"Let me tell you another anecdote, not less to the purpose. A thorough-bred foxhunter found himself so much out of health a little before the season for his sport began, that he took what was then thought a long journey to consult a physician, and get some advice which he hoped would put him into a condition for taking the field. Upon his return his friends asked him what the doctor had said. 'Why,' said the squire, he told me that I've got a dyspepsy. I don't know what that is; but it's some damned thing or other, I suppose.' My good sir, however much at a loss you may be to guess what is coming in the next chapter, you can have no apprehension that it may turn out anything like what he, with too much reason, supposed a dyspepsy to be.

"Lecteur, mon ami, I have given you the advantage of a motto from Sophocles; and were it as apposite to me as it seems applicable when coming from you, I might content myself with replying to it in a couplet of the honest old winebibbing Water Poet:

That man may well be called an idle mome
That mocks the cock because he wears a comb.'

But no one who knows a hawk from a heronshaw, or a sheep's head from a carrot, or the Lord Chancellor Brougham, in his wig and robes, from a Guy Vaux on the fifth of November, can be so mistaken in judgment as to say that I make use of many words in making nothing understood; nor as to think me,

ἄνθρωπον ἀγριοποιον, αὐθαδόστομον,

ἔχοντ' ἀχαλινον, ἀκρατες, ἀπύλωτον στόμα,
ἀπεριλάλητον, κομποφακελοῤῥήμονα.*

* Aristophanes.

"Any subject is inexhaustible if it be fully treated of; that is, if it be treated doctrinally and practically, analytically and synthetically, historically and morally, critically, popularly, and eloquently, philosophically, exegetically, and æsthetically, logically, neologically, etymologically, archaiologic.. ally, Daniologically, and Doveologically, which is to say, summing up all in one, doctorologically.

"Now, my good reader, whether I handle my subject in any of these ways, or in any other legitimate way, this is cer, tain, that I never handle it as a cow does a musket; and that I have never wandered from it, not even when you have drawn me into a tattle-de-moy."

"Auctor incomparabilis, what is a tattle-de-moy ?"

"Lecteur, mon ami, you shall now know what to expect in the next chapter, for I will tell you there what a tattle-de. moy is."

CHAPTER XCIV. P. I.

THE AUTHOR DISCOVERS CERTAIN MUSICAL CORRESPONDENCES TO THESE HIS LUCUBRATIONS.

And music mild I learn'd, that tells

Tune, time, and measure of the song.
HIGGINS.

66

A TATTLE-DE-MOY, reader, was a newfashioned thing” in the year of our Lord 1676, "much like a seraband, only it had in it more of conceit and of humour, and it might supply the place of a seraband at the end of a suit of lessons at any time." That simplehearted, and therefore happy old man, Thomas Mace, invented it himself, because he would be a little modish, he said; and he called it a tattle-de-moy, "because it tattles, and seems to speak those very words or syllables. Its humour," said he, "is toyish, jocund, harmless, and pleasant; and as if it were one playing with or tossing a ball up and down; yet it seems to have a very solemn countenance, and like unto one of a sober and innocent condition or disposition; not antic, apish, or wild."

If, indeed, the gift of prophecy were imparted, or imputed to musicians as it has sometimes been to poets, Thomas Mace might be thought to have unwittingly foreshown certain characteristics of the unique opus which is now before the reader; so nearly has he described them when instruct