Treacherous as are the seas upon which he finds himself embarked, however, he takes comfort in the thought that the book has been put together probably "not without some measure of truth and virtuous intent."

One is reminded of Caxton's skeptical preface to the Morte Darthur: "For to pass the time, this book shall be pleasant to read in, but for to give faith and belief that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty." And indeed this same honest Caxton, "simple person" as he confesses himself to be, set type to no better purpose in the Morte Darthur itself than in the modest preface with which he gave it to the world: "Wherefore ... I have under the simple conning that God hath sent to me, under the favour and correction of all noble lords and gentlemen, enprised to imprint a book of the noble histories of the said King Arthur, and of certain of his knights

to the intent that noble men may see and learn the noble acts of chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in those days, by which they came to honour, and how they that were vicious were punished and oft put to shame and rebuke; humbly beseeching all noble lords and ladies, with all other estates of what other estate or degree they been of, that shall see and read in this said book and work, that they take the good and honest acts in their remembrance, and to follow the same. Wherein they shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee."

It was with equal sincerity if perhaps less charm of style that Defoe in his prefaces used to point the moral of his adventurous yarns. That remarkable personage, Colonel Jacque,-"who was born a Gentleman, put 'prentice to a Pick

pocket, flourished six and twenty years as a Thief, and was then kidnapped to Virginia; came back a Merchant, went into the Wars, behaved bravely, got preferment, was made Colonel of a Regiment, came over and fled with the Chevalier, is still Abroad completing a Life of Wonders, and resolves to die a General," - enjoy his rascality as we may to-day, was conceived by the author in a spirit of the most commendable piety. “The various turns of his fortune in the world make a delightful field for the reader to wander in; a garden where he may gather wholesome and medicinal fruits, none noxious or poisonous; where he will see virtue and the ways of wisdom everywhere applauded, honoured, encouraged, rewarded; vice and all kinds of wickedness attended with misery, many kinds of infelicities; and at last, sin and shame going together, the persons meeting with reproof and reproach, and the crimes with abhorrence.

"Every wicked reader" (this is refreshing; the class has apparently ceased to exist to-day)" will here be encouraged to a change, and it will appear that the best and only good end of an impious, misspent life is repentance; that in this there is comfort, peace and oftentimes hope, and that the penitent shall be returned like the prodigal, and his latter end be better than his beginning."

The italics are Defoe's, - which leaves no doubt about his pious intentions, whatever we may think of the fact that, so far as the book is concerned, the beginning is much better than the latter end. The old Adam in Defoe rather loses zest in the redoubtable Colonel after the latter's reformation is effected.

But not all the prefaces of former times are marked by such a sweet humility as Caxton's or such a worthy piety as Defoe's. Burly Ben Jonson is never burlier than in the poetic forewords to his plays; and in the first of them that the prologue of Every Man in his Humour may have been composed at a later date is of no moment - his prefatory remarks are

-

of no uncertain tenor. Not for him the base truckling of those poets who would serve the "ill customs of the age." Rather be pleased to see

One such today as other plays should be, wherein, instead of the crudities and impossibilities of the romantic drama, you shall find

Deeds and language such as men do use, And persons such as comedy would choose. Izaak Walton, as became his calling, was not so self-assertive as the author of Every Man in his Humour, but he is every whit as indifferent to criticism; and nowhere in the Compleat Angler proper is the cool self-sufficiency of the true brother of the angle better brought out than in these words from the preface: "And though this Discourse may be liable to some exceptions, yet I cannot doubt but that most Readers may receive so much pleasure or profit by it, as may make it worthy the time of their perusal, if they be not too grave or too busy men. And I wish the Reader also to take notice, that in writing of it, I have made myself a recreation of a recreation; and that it may prove so to him, and not read dull and tediously, I have in several places mixed, not any scurrility, but some innocent, harmless mirth, of which, if thou be a severe, sour complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge."

"A recreation of a recreation!". happy the man who can confess to such a cheerful spontaneity of composition! So Bunyan, in the quaintly rhymed preface to Pilgrim's Progress, testifies that the work was done, “mine own self to gratifie:"

But yet I did not think

To show to all the World my Pen and Ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what: nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour; no, not I.
I did it mine own self to gratifie.
... And so I penned

It down, until at last it came to be

For length and breadth the bigness which you

see.

Well, when I had thus put mine ends together, I shew'd them others, that I might see whether

They would condemn them or them justifie : And some said, Let them live; some, Let them die.

Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so; Some said, It might do good; others said, No. Now was I in a straight, and did not see Which was the best thing to be done by me : At last, I thought, Since you are thus divided, I print it will; and so the case decided.

When Ben Jonson blustered, he also "made good;" and Bunyan could afford to thank Providence that his neighbor's "John, print it," had decided his uncertain course; but it is not uncommon to follow the preface through its throes of parturition only to find that the product is little more than a ridiculous mouse. Dr. Johnson's cynical reference to his early instructor in English, who "published a spelling book and dedicated it to the universe," will be remembered; and I have before me an ancient grammar which makes its bow to the waiting world with no less pomposity. Published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1854, it purports to be "A Compendious Treatise on the Languages English, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, and French, founded on the immutable principle of the relation which one word sustains to another." By way of frontispiece rises a gigantic tree-trunk from which juts out a massive limb. Upon the trunk in great black letters is the word "God," and along the limb in print of equal magnitude are the words "hath spoken." "God hath spoken!" Could a more effective preface be imagined? It is true that, upon closer examination, lettered twigs devolving from trunk and limb resolve themselves into a pictorial grammatical analysis of the first verse of the first chapter of Hebrews; but the primary impression, the awful sensation of Jupiter tonans, remains unimpaired.

The worthy author of this forgotten grammar threw the responsibility for its fate upon the Almighty, with apparently no doubt that, between author and Sponsor, the days of the Compendious Treatise would be long in the land. Other and more mundane support had he, too, for

upon

the fly-leaves clusters a very musterroll of the great names of his day, - Millard Fillmore, H. Clay, Winfield Scott, William H. Seward, Hamilton Fish, Bayard Taylor, Henry W. Longfellow, Jared Sparks, and a score of others—all the signatures in unmistakably authentic facsimile. With such stately inaugural the Compendious Treatise takes its oath of office. How the little barefooted poets and novelists-to-be must have climbed the lamp posts to catch a glimpse of the majestic figure! How the man who had been made Laureate of England four years before, had chance of traffic brought a copy to his hand, how Tennyson would have smiled! and perhaps turned back musingly to the preface of a thin little volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers, - "Haec novimus esse nihil" had been its modest motto, - and the preface: "We have passed the Rubicon and we leave the rest to fate, though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged from the shade and courted notoriety."

The prefatory pronouncement of the Compendious Treatise had at least the merit of brevity; and, indeed, unless the nature of the case calls for an elaborate disquisition, or unless, as in the case of Scott, the book in question has already won a recognition which warrants unlimited personalia, the proud author has generally been content to "show himself for a moment in the portico," and then turn the public loose in his vaulted corridors. "If brevity is the soul of wit anywhere, it is most especially so in a preface," remarks Dickens, who did live up

to this principle in his prefaces, however he violated it in his stories; "firstly, because those who do read such things as prefaces prefer them, like grace before meat, in an epigrammatic form; and secondly, because nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of every thousand never read a preface at all;" and to this brevity the hopeful author must add a special savor of personality, if he do not wish to be a candidate for the obliviousness of the nine hundred and ninety-nine. It is the rare preface which inspires in the breast of the reader the hope of Nick Bottom, the weaver, "I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb."

After all, it was a fellow countryman and contemporary of the forgotten author of the Compendious Treatise who could most skillfully compound his prefaces of these two indispensable elements, and put the gentle reader into the best possible humor with himself, the world, the author, and the volume in hand; and of Dr. Holmes's many genial prefaces, one likes best to recall that which ushered the delightful series of Autocrat papers to an audience even larger than the Atlantic could furnish. "I cannot make the book over again," wrote the old Doctor, twenty-five years after the papers had appeared in the magazine," and I will not try to mend old garments with new cloth. Let the sensible reader take it for granted that the author would agree with him in changing whatever he would alter; in leaving out whatever he would omit."

Could anything be more urbane?

SOMEWHERE, in what has been classified as the eighth period of English Literature, beginning about the year 1830, the ghost-story, all over the world, became very much the fashion. The perfection which this form of romantic narrative had reached through the art of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne made dealings with the mystic, the weird, and the supernatural widely popular, and every new writer was moved to try his hand at it. The current of scientific investigation had not set in that way, time and space were not yet minimized by steam and electricity, and local tradition, with an archaic or feudal background, aided by that lurking dread of something after death which, according to Hamlet, we all inherit, combined to make the wildest freak of the clever writer's imagination almost credible. He

could sound what stop he pleased, when every respectable English neighborhood busily circled round the whispered word about its haunted chamber, when any sluggish, ill-tempered old Scotchman ran the risk of being avoided as a warlock, and even the virgin forest of North America was full of spells and warnings. In consequence, we were overwhelmed by a legion of purely fictitious phantoms, varying from the mute and dignified courtier-like type in old lace and high-heeled shoes, to the merry, whimsical intruder from the other world, with a good-humored twinkle in his eye, or the shrouded, shrieking raw-head-and-bloody-bones nuisance who drove his chance acquaintance mad at sight.

Many of us now find these monstrous attempts to shatter our peace of mind

very dreary and childish; but that the world at large is neither entirely cured of its superstitious faith, nor even convalescent, must be clear to any traveler who penetrates to regions remote from great cities. Belief in the evil eye is uncomfortably prevalent throughout Italy, where charms are worn against it, and the sign to ward off its dire effects is still made by intelligent persons who ought to be above such nonsense. And after generations of enlightenment, Scotland would rather be haunted than not. The other day I talked with a very modern young woman who lives next door to Glamis Castle, and is akin to the heir, who is popularly supposed to be weighed down by tidings from the secret chamber, whenever he comes of age. She laughed at my reference to the story, and said: “Oh, when I want to know about that, I always consult an American." She then cheered me by reciting a legend of the castle touching a certain Lady Griselda, who, following her lord and master in the dead of night, was caught and punished for her curiosity by having her tongue torn out and her hands cut off; and at the present time wanders up and down stairs, waving her bleeding stumps wildly, to the terror of the servants.

“After all,” her relative continued, “it is n't strange that any tale of horror should be believed about Glamis. For the house is low, dark, and peculiarly gloomy, carpeted everywhere with old India matting which deadens the sound of a footstep, so that even the living members of the family glide over it like spectres."

"How about your house?" I asked. "Is n't that haunted too?"

credit it. At any rate, it was not her habit to walk in the park at twilight.

Talk about this recalled an occurrence very near home. One of my friends hired for the summer Hawthorne's Old Manse, at Concord. And, before moving into it, he lent one of the servants a wideawake young woman the Mosses from an Old Manse to read by way of preparation. Unfortunately, in the introduction Hawthorne makes a humorous reference to the minister, the first tenant of the house in provincial times, and to his silken gown which may still be heard rustling through the passages by discreet listeners of finer sense. The girl put her finger upon this, and declined service in summer quarters where such things were possible. Nothing could induce her to change her mind. There it was, printed in the book, and she ended by resigning her place.

-

To return to the unauthentic bogie of pure fiction: when Bulwer came along, he rang some splendid changes upon the familiar theme, juggling with occult science, and working in natural phenomena, by the way, most artfully. The caldron, refreshed with new ingredients, bubbled up again, and the mystical tale was given another lease of life, - but with a difference, which was really an immense gain. The reader no longer was asked to believe in a ghostly visitant stepping directly from the other world with the habit of this one, as he lived, fresh, unwrinkled, and complete to the last button. This manifest absurdity was done away with, and the far more subtle trick was to get the gentle reader off his guard in lonely places, to chill him with damp and mould, and cloud his brain with vaporous association; then, all conditions being favorable, to leave him in doubt as to the conjuror's own state of mind regarding the manifestation or apparition; this, with consummate charm of style, and a strict attention to business in the setting of the scene, where all must be conceivable, nothing exaggerated.

Execution, perhaps, has greater value