I am too stubborn in habits, and too little polished in manners, to envy or aspire to the honours assigned to my literary contemporaries.  I could not think a whit more highly of myself were I found worthy to “come in place as a lion” for a winter in the great metropolis.  I could not rise, turn round, and show all my honours, from the shaggy mane to the tufted tail, “roar you an’t were any nightingale,” and so lie down again like a well-behaved beast of show, and all at the cheap and easy rate of a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and butter as thin as a wafer.  And I could ill stomach the fulsome flattery with which the lady of the evening indulges her show-monsters on such occasions, as she crams her parrots with sugar-plums, in order to make them talk before company.  I cannot be tempted to “come aloft” for these marks of distinction, and, like imprisoned Samson, I would rather remain—­if such must be the alternative—­all my life in the mill-house, grinding for my very bread, than be brought forth to make sport for the Philistine lords and ladies.  This proceeds from no dislike, real or affected, to the aristocracy of these realms.  But they have their place, and I have mine; and, like the iron and earthen vessels in the old fable, we can scarce come into collision without my being the sufferer in every sense.  It may be otherwise with the sheets which I am now writing.  These may be opened and laid aside at pleasure; by amusing themselves with the perusal, the great will excite no false hopes; by neglecting or condemning them, they will inflict no pain; and how seldom can they converse with those whose minds have toiled for their delight without doing either the one or the other.

In the better and wiser tone of feeling with Ovid only expresses in one line to retract in that which follows, I can address these quires—­

Parve, nec invideo, sine me, liber, ibis in urbem.

Nor do I join the regret of the illustrious exile, that he himself could not in person accompany the volume, which he sent forth to the mart of literature, pleasure, and luxury.  Were there not a hundred similar instances on record, the rate of my poor friend and school-fellow, Dick Tinto, would be sufficient to warn me against seeking happiness in the celebrity which attaches itself to a successful cultivator of the fine arts.

Dick Tinto, when he wrote himself artist, was wont to derive his origin from the ancient family of Tinto, of that ilk, in Lanarkshire, and occasionally hinted that he had somewhat derogated from his gentle blood in using the pencil for his principal means of support.  But if Dick’s pedigree was correct, some of his ancestors must have suffered a more heavy declension, since the good man his father executed the necessary, and, I trust, the honest, but certainly not very distinguished, employment of tailor in ordinary to the village of Langdirdum in the west..  Under his humble roof was Richard born, and to his father’s humble