NOTE.
THE separate publication of this sketch has been forced upon me by the “somewhat free use” made of it in a second and thereby enlarged edition of the “little book” to which I owe my introduction to Marjorie Fleming,—but nothing more; a “use” so exceedingly “free” as to extend almost to everything with which I had ventured perhaps to encumber the letters and journals of that dear child. To be called “kind and genial” by the individual who devised this edition has, strange as he may think it, altogether failed to console me. Empty praise without the solid pudding is proverbially a thing of naught; but what shall we say of praise the emptiness of which is aggravated, not merely by the absence, but by the actual abstraction, of the pudding?
This little act of conveyancing—this “engaging compilation,” as he would have called it—puts me in mind of that pleasant joke in the preface to “Essays by Mr. Goldsmith”: “I would desire in this case, to imitate that fat man whom I have somewhere heard of in a shipwreck, who when the sailors, prest by famine, were taking slices from his body, to satisfy their hunger, insisted with great justice on having the first cut for himself.”
I have to thank the proprietors of the North British Review for permitting this reprint.
J. B.