equally with rank and riches, have often cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of a man, fret, wear, worry him,—­to be irritable is the conditional tax laid of old upon an author’s intellect; the crowd of internal imagery makes him hasty, quick, nervous, as a haunted, hunted man—­minds of coarser web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a texture,—­they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a tougher scabbard,—­the river, not content with channel and restraining banks, overflows perpetually,—­the extortionate exacting armies of the ideal and the causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make a patriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace.  I write these things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd increase,—­I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and Elijah with the priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my mental nurslings; a dire resolve has filled me to effect a premature destruction of the literary populace superfaetating in my brain,—­plays, novels, essays, tales, homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and poetics, politics and rhetorics, will I display no more mercy than sundry commentators of maltreated Aristotle.  I will exhibit them in their state chaotic,—­I will addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not chirp,—­I will reveal, and secrets shall not waste me; I will write, and thoughts shall not batten on me.”

The whole volume, as before-mentioned, is an epitome or quintessence of more than thirty works,—­perhaps the best being “The Prior of Marrick,” a story of idolatry; “Anti-Xurion,” a crusade against razors; and “The Author’s Tribunal,” an oration; but I confess, not having looked at the book since my hair was black (and now it is snow-white), and considering that I wrote it forty-five years ago, I am surprised to find how well worth reading is my old Author’s Mind.  It may some day attain a resurrection:  possibly even, in more than the skeleton form of its present appearance, muscles and skin being added, in a detailed filling up and finishing of these mere sketches, if only time and opportunity were given to me.  But I much fear at my time of life that my Tragedy of Nero must remain unwritten, as also my Novel of Charlotte Clopton, and that thrilling Handbook of the Marvellous; not to mention my abortive Epic of Home, and sundry essays, satires, and other lucubrations which, alas! may now be considered addled eggs.  In a last word, I somewhat vaingloriously claim for authorship, as thus:—­

    The Cathedral Mind.

    “Temple of truths most eloquently spoken,
      Shrine of sweet thoughts veil’d round with words of power,
    The Author’s Mind in all its hallowed riches
      Stands a Cathedral; full of precious things—­
    Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken,
      Cloister and aisle, dark crypt and aery tower;
    Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches