“My soul’s own son, dear image of my mind,
      I would not without blessing send thee forth
    Into the bleak wide world, whose voice unkind
      Perchance will mock at thee as nothing worth;
    For the cold critic’s jealous eye may find
      In all thy purposed good little but ill,
    May taunt thy simple garb as quaintly wrought,
      And praise thee for no more than the small skill
    Of masquing as thine own another’s thought: 
      What then? count envious sneers as less than nought: 
    Fair is thine aim,—­and having done thy best,
    So, thus I bless thee; yea, thou shalt be blest!”

There were also two others afterward, in the jubilate vein; but I spare my reader, albeit they are curiously prophetic of the wide good-doing since accomplished.

To the above numerous commendations which indeed might be indefinitely extended, it is only fair to add that “Proverbial Philosophy” has run the gauntlet of both hemispheres also in the way of parody, ridicule, plagiaristic imitation, and in some instances of envious and malignant condemnation.  It has won on each side both praise from the good and censure from the bad:  our comic papers have amused us with its travesties—­as Church Liturgies and Holy Writ have been similarly parodied,—­and some of the modern writers who are unfriendly to Christian influences have done their small endeavour to damage both the book and its author through adverse criticism.  But their efforts are vain.  They have availed only to advance—­from first to last now for some forty-five years—­the world-wide success of “Proverbial Philosophy.”

If it is expected, as a matter of impartiality, that I should here print adverse criticisms as well as those which are favourable, I simply decline to be so foolish:  a caricature impresses where a portrait is forgotten:  the litera scripta in printer’s ink remains and is quotable for ever, and I do not think it worth while deliberately to traduce myself and my book children by adopting the opinions of dyspeptic scribes who will find how well I think of them in my Proverbial Essay “Zoilism;” which, by the way, I read at St. Andrews, before some chiefs of that university, with A.K.H.B. in the chair.

* * * * *

Accordingly, I prefer now to appear one-sided, as a piece of common sense; quite indifferent to the charge of vain-gloriousness; all the good verdicts quoted are genuine, absolutely unpaid and unrewarded, and are matters of sincere and skilled opinion; so being such I prize them:  the opposing judgments—­much fewer, and far less hearty, as “willing to wound and yet afraid to strike”—­may as well perish out of memory by being ignored and neglected.  Here is a social anecdote to illustrate what I mean.  I once knew a foolish young nobleman of the highest rank who—­to spite his younger brother as he fancied—­posted him up in his club for having called him “a maggot;” and all he got for his pains in this exposure was that the name stuck to himself for life! so it is not necessary to borrow fame’s trumpet to proclaim one’s few dispraises.