8 PROLEGOMENON. 



lantern and flambeau of the nineteenth century in full blaze 

 of illumination. Here is ever the sad tragedy, " the pale 

 realm of shade ;" here is the dim domain of doubt and fear. 



All literature seems but the record of blunders, more or 

 less flagrant and pitiable, of the thought trying to get the 

 fatal word. How, then, shall a preface tell the " main 

 design" of a book, essay, or discourse, when most books, 

 essays, and discourses fail to tell it themselves, or succeed 

 but lamely ? A preface is often a simple Oyez ! to the 

 world, admonishing all persons that there is something for 

 sale in the shape of intellectual merchandise, of which it 

 affects to be a more or less perfect invoice. More generally 

 the preface appears a forlorn and scraggy creation, in the 

 form of a supplication to the reader to have faith and go 

 on, to screw up his courage to wade through the coming 

 revelation, it may be of chaos and night, of heaviness and 

 sleep; with a solemn assurance that his threshing shall not 

 be of straw alone, but that the winnowing thereof will give 

 some grains of wheat. 



Or, again, a preface appears a sheepish, stammering 

 apology, a gawkish, blundering prayer for forgiveness for 

 the impertinence and folly of asking a fellow-sinner to read 

 something that the writer knows, and blushes to feel, is not 

 worth his perusal. More frequently it comes in the shape 

 of a mendicant address, a bow profound, an obsequious dis- 

 play of flags of truce, or some show of the white feather, or 

 acknowledgment of the presence of the carrion-crow, fear. 

 "Authors in their prefaces generally speak in a concilia- 

 tory, deprecating tone of the critics, whom they hate and 

 fear; as of old the Greeks spoke of the Furies as the 

 jEumenides, the Benign Goddesses." One other very import- 

 ant fact about prefaces is, be they what they may, "pre- 

 liminary discourses," "analytic synopses," camera-obscura 

 pictures-iDEAL of the coming REAL, or precursors however 

 luminous, elaborated, and useful, they are never read. It 

 is sometimes said that the name of a book its title-page 

 suggests what it is, or is redolent of its contents. This 



