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Though we need not take too literally a poet's prefatorial remarks, Vergil doubtless hoped that his Georgics might turn men's thoughts towards a serious effort at rehabilitating agriculture, and the practical-minded Maecenas certainly encouraged the work with some such aim in view. The government might well be deeply concerned.

The result was that a tract was printed, containing a full account of all the principal incidents; and the fact that this pamphlet was reprinted once, if not twice, in London, shows that interest in the affair spread south of the Border; and this is confirmed by the publisher's prefatorial apology, in which he states that the pamphlet was printed to prevent the public from being imposed upon by unauthorized and extravagant statements of what had taken place.

There doesn't seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang, and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon. "Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial phrase I recall.

The man who would coolly appropriate some discoveries of others under cloak of a mere prefatorial reference was perhaps an expounder rather than an innovator, and had, it is shrewdly suspected, not much of his own to offer. Meanwhile, it is tolerably certain that Ctesibius was the discoverer of the principle of the siphon, of the forcing-pump, and of a pneumatic organ.

Trust me, there is better praise in this, than in dazzling the distracted glance with a perpetual succession of luminous fire-flies, and dragging your fair novel-reader, harried and excited, through the mazes of a thousand incidents. Thirdly, and lastly, in this prefatorial say, there is to be considered that inevitable defeator of all printed secrets impatience.

Trust me, there is better praise in this, than in dazzling the distracted glance with a perpetual succession of luminous fire-flies, and dragging your fair novel-reader, harried and excited, through the mazes of a thousand incidents. Thirdly, and lastly, in this prefatorial say, there is to be considered that inevitable defeator of all printed secrets impatience.