And pray, Gentle Critic, do not tell me that I must be content simply to amuse, or must—­anything else.  Must is a hard word; be not over-confident of its power.  I feel a grandmotherly interest in the world and its ways; and much as I should like to amuse it, I shall never be content with that.  You may not like to be instructed, my dear children, but instructed you shall be.  You read long ago, in your story-book, that little Tommy Piper didn’t want his face washed, though he was very willing to be amused with soap-bubbles; but his face needed washing and got it.  I come to you with soap-bubbles indeed, but with scrubbing-brushes also.  If you take to them kindly, it will soon be over; but if you scream and struggle, I shall not only scrub the harder, but be all the longer about it.

Sometimes your grave refutations are very amusing.  It is astonishing to see how crank-proof sundry minds are.  Everything seems to them on a dead level of categorical proposition.  They walk up to every statue with their measuring-line of Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque Prioris, and measure them off with equal solemnity, telling you severely that this nose is far longer than the classic rule admits, and this arm has not the swelling proportions of life,—­never seeing, that, though another statue was indeed designed for an Antinoues, this was never meant to be anything but a broomstick dressed in your grandfather’s cloak, with a lantern in a pumpkin for a head.  Oh, the dreariness of having to explain pleasantry! of appending to your banter Artemas Ward’s parenthesis, “This is a goak”! of dealing with people who do not know the difference between a blow and a “love-pat,” between Quaker guns and an Armstrong battery, between a granite paving-stone and the moonshine on a mud-puddle!

Dear Public, don’t begin to be tired yet.  I am not.  There are many books still to come, if they can ever be brought to light.  They were ready long ago, but no publisher could be found; and now that I have found a publisher, I cannot find the books.  There is a treatise on the Curvature of the Square,—­a Dissertation on Foreign Literature,—­two or three novels,—­a book on Human Life, that is going to turn the world upside down,—­a book on Theology, dull enough to be sensible, that is going to turn it back again,—­and a bandboxful of children’s stories.  Still, in spite of this formidable prospect, take the consolation that an end is sure to come.  There is not a particle of reserved force or dormant power or anything of the kind for you to dread.  All there is of me is awake.  I have struck twelve, and at longest it will be but a little while before I shall run down,—­

    “And silence like a poultice come
        To heal the blows of sound.”

And does not the exquisite sensation of departed pain almost atone for the discomfort of its presence?  How heartily, for your sake, would I be the most profound and able writer in the world, and how gladly should all my profundity and ability be laid at your feet!  And since