PREAMBLE. It is much to be regretted that the Author of these two volumes (the forerunners, probably, of a numerous host) should be no longer in the land of the living, were it but to furnish his publishers with a general preface, explanatory, in limine, of the scope and tendency of his multitudinous writings. Such deficiency is felt more acutely by us, on whom hath devolved, with the custody of his coffer, the guardianship of his glory; since, having in our youth learnt from Epictetus that every sublunary thing has two handles (παν πραγμα δυας εχει λαβας), we have subsequently gathered from experience that mankind is prone to take hold of the wrong one. King Ptolemy of Egypt, to whom we are indebted for the first translation of the Bible (and to whom is consequently due a long outstanding arrear of "centenary celebrations"), was careful to proclaim, in the pithy inscription placed by his order over the entrance of the Alexandrian Library, that books were a sort of physic: giving us thereby to understand that, like other patent medicines, they should be accompanied with copious "directions for use," to obviate sundry and sometimes fatal blunders. In this case we would fain supply the desiderated πроλeyoμeva ourselves, were we not apprehensive of being charged with excessive presumption in fancying ourselves adequate to a task of such delicacy, merely because we happen to be the editors of these "Reliques." The attempt might place us in a position which we would, if possible, endeavour to eschew; having profitably studied an instructive fable of La Fontaine, viz. "L'áne qui portait les reliques.” (liv. v. fab. 14.) Nevertheless, it is not our intention, in giving utterance to such very rational regret, to insinuate that the present production of the lamented writer is unfinished, abortive, or incomplete: on the contrary, our interest prompts us to pronounce it perfect, as far as it goes. It requires, in point of fact, no extrinsic matter; and Prout as an author will be found what he was in the |