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Updated: May 29, 2025
The booksellers, justly sensible of the great additional value of the copy-right, presented him with another hundred pounds, over and above two hundred, for which his agreement was to furnish such prefaces as he thought fit.
Trent prefaces the companion portraits with a sketch of the typical Georgian; his State, like the other Gulf States, less civilized and orderly than Virginia and South Carolina, less critical and more enthusiastic; the Georgian, "the southern Yankee," "loving success, strength, straightforwardness, and the solid virtues generally, neither is he averse to the showy ones; but above all he loves virtue in action."
This author, with a whimsical gravity, prefaces his definition with the remark, that the nature of life has hitherto been sought for in abstract considerations; as if it were possible that four more inveterate abstractions could be brought together in one sentence than are here assembled in the words, life, death, function, and resistance.
By yet, when we look over the Prefaces to those Acts of Parliament whereby some Church revenues were granted to HENRY VIII., one cannot but be much taken with the ingenuity of that Parliament; that when the King wanted a supply of money and an augmentation to his revenue, how handsomely, out of the Church they made provision for him, without doing themselves any injury at all!
First, I am far from granting the number of writers a nuisance to our nation, having strenuously maintained the contrary in several parts of the following discourse; secondly, I do not well understand the justice of this proceeding, because I observe many of these polite prefaces to be not only from the same hand, but from those who are most voluminous in their several productions; upon which I shall tell the reader a short tale.
Their letters and prefaces sounded like a satire upon his own attitude, a reductio ad absurdum of his claims to "genius". Here, for instance, was a man who wrote to introduce himself as America's first epic poet stating incidentally that he was an inspector of gas-meters, and had a wife and six children.
If I have only succeeded, therefore, in relieving the mind of one sensitive and retiring fish from the absurd obloquy cast upon its appearance when it ventures away for awhile from its proper element, then, in the pathetic and prophetic words borrowed from a thousand uncut prefaces, this work will not, I trust, have been written in vain.
It is not only full of such admirable generalizations as that in which he sums up the case for a literary as against a mathematical or scientific education: "The truth is that the knowledge of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. . . . We are perpetually moralists: we are geometricians only by chance"; or that in which he expresses his contempt for Dryden exchanging Billingsgate with Settle: "Minds are not levelled in their powers, but when they are first levelled in their desires"; or the pregnant commonplace with which he prefaces his derision of the artificial love-poems which Cowley thought it necessary to address to an imaginary mistress: "It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of a college or in the bustle of the world, to find useful studies and serious employment."
I, for my part, venerate the inventor of indexes; and I know not to whom to yield the preference, either to Hippocrates, who was the first great anatomiser of the human body, or to that unknown labourer in literature, who first laid open the nerves and arteries of a book. Watts advises the perusal of the prefaces and the index of a book, as they both give light on its contents.
Printing, with its ease of multiplication, had made publication a far more definite act than it was in the days of manuscripts. In the prefaces to his early compositions, Erasmus almost always assumes this guise. More actually wrote to Warham and to another friend that the Utopia had been printed without his knowledge. Of course this was not true, but nobody misunderstood him.
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