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This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades, and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten years. The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters.
"Shall I annoy you if I sit down and read Blackstone a little?" "Not at all." He read the title-page, glanced at the American preface, etc., and then plunged in promiscuously. "It has less Latin than I expected. Is it good classical Latin?" A smile. "It is law Latin, and most of it would have puzzled Cicero and Virgil, I fear. Are you a Latin scholar?" "I'm not a scholar at all.
"I do everything through weakness," he soliloquized, and, taking my book, opened it as if to dismiss our theme. But I bade him turn to the preface, where heavily scored by the same feminine hand which had written on the blank leaf opposite, "Richard Thorndyke Smith, from C.O." we read something like this: The seed of heroism is in all of us.
Even Virgil was ready to insert a few lines here and there in a poem to gratify his friends, or to choose a subject that he knew would please the Emperor; but Livy wrote on the subject that pleased him and treated it just as he believed to be best. His great work was his history, and this he begins with a little preface, as independent as it is graceful.
I speak in the Preface of "offering suggestions towards a work, which must be uppermost in the mind of every true son of the English Church at this day, the consolidation of a theological system, which, built upon those formularies, to which all clergymen are bound, may tend to inform, persuade, and absorb into itself religious minds, which hitherto have fancied, that, on the peculiar Protestant questions, they were seriously opposed to each other."
To have done all this, and to have explained what was done and what was attempted in language of such manliness, modesty and eloquence as that of the great Preface, is to have rendered one of the greatest services that can be rendered to the literature of a nation. "The chief glory of every people," says Johnson, "arises from its authors."
At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says:
"But Cardinal Bergerot," said he, "wrote me a letter of approval, which I placed at the beginning of my work as a preface. Ought not a guarantee like that to have been sufficient for the French episcopacy?" Monsignor Fornaro wagged his head in a knowing way before making up his mind to reply: "Ah! yes, no doubt, his Eminence's letter, a very beautiful letter.
We hear of the woods, the fields, the cottages, the little church and its bells, the garden where she sat and sewed, the mother's stories, the morning mass, in this quiet preface of the little maiden's life; but nothing of the highroad with its wayfarers, the convoys of provisions for the war, the fighting men that were coming and going.
The last glimpse of the life of Cervantes I have space for, is from his own inimitable pen, and is taken from the preface to the "Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda," which was published by the author's widow.
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