“It might be thought indelicate in me to quote at length the many pleasant greetings of the press to my first odd volumes; suffice it to say, that the kind critics were with few exceptions unanimous in commendation; and some great names, as Heraud, Leigh Hunt, and St. John particularly favoured me,—­the latter prophesying a tenth edition:  but I must still condescend to pick out at the end of this paper a few of the plums of praise wherewith my early publication was indulged, if only to please the numerous admirers of my chief ‘lifework.’  One comfort is that no one of my reviewers all my life through has ever been bought or rewarded.  As to the less fulsome style of criticism, I was supposed by the Spectator to have ’written in hexameters,’—­as if David or Solomon had ever imitated Homer or some more ancient predecessor of his; and the Sun fancied that I had ’culled from Erasmus, Bacon, Franklin, and Saavedra,’ whereas I was totally ignorant of their wisdoms:  Saavedra I have since learned is Cervantes.  The Sunday Times finds ’Proverbial Philosophy’ ‘very like Dodsley’s “Economy of Human Life,"’ but I may say I never saw that neat little book of maxims till my brother Dan gave it to me fourteen years after my Philosophy was public property; I am also by this critic supposed to have ’imitated the Gulistan or Bostan of Saadi,’—­whereof I need not profess my total ignorance:  however, the writer kindly says of me, ’if he fail to make himself heard, the fault will be rather in the public than in him.’  The Metropolitan propounds that ’a book like this would make a man’s fortune in the East, but we are afraid that philosophy in proverbs has no great chance in the West:  we should recommend the author to get it translated into Arabic.’” [I have since heard that some of it has been.] Let this be enough as to those first fruits of criticism, which might be extended to satiety; but I decline to become “inebriated with the exuberance of my own verbosity,” as Beaconsfield has it about Gladstone.

To carry on the story of my old book, its second series was due to Harrison Ainsworth, at all events instrumentally.  For, just as he was establishing his special magazine, he asked me to help him with a contribution in the style of that then new popularity, my Proverbs.  This I sturdily declined; for in my young days, it was thought ungentlemanlike to write in magazines, though dukes, archbishops, and premiers do so now:  even authorship for money was thought vulgar:  but, when there greeted me at home a parcel of well-bound books as a gift from the author, being all that were then extant of Ainsworth’s, I was so taken aback by his kindly munificence that I somewhat penitentially responded thereto by an impromptu chapter on “Gifts,” wherewith I made the quarrel up and he was delighted:  one or two others following.  However, I was too quick and too impatient to wait for piecemeal publication month by month,—­seeing I soon had my second