It may also be worthy of mention that on this side of the Atlantic as well as on the other (see especially the case of N.P.  Willis) it has often been taken for granted that the author of “Proverbial Philosophy” has been dead for generations.  No doubt this is due both to the antique style of the book and to the retiring habits of its author:  comparatively few of my readers know me by sight.  I could mention many proofs of this belief in my non-existence:  here is one; a daughter of mine is asked lately by an eminent person if she is a descendant of the celebrated Elizabethan author? and when that individual in passing round the room came near to the Professor, and was introduced to him as her father, the man could scarcely be brought to believe that his long-departed book friend was positively alive before him.  The Professor looked as if he had seen a ghost.

* * * * *

Throughout this volume I wish my courteous readers to bear in mind that the writer excludes from it as much as possible the strictly private and personal element; it is intended to be mainly authorial or on matters therewith connected.  Moreover, if they will considerately take into account that as a youth and until middle age I was, from the speech-impediment since overcome, isolated from the gaieties of society, as also that I religiously abstained from theatricals at a time before Macready, who has since purified them into a very fair school of morals,—­to say less of having been engaged in marriage from seventeen to twenty-five,—­I can have (for example) no love adventures to offer for amusement, nor any dramatic anecdotes such as Ruskin might supply.  The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is full of entertaining and highly coloured incidents which could not be possible to one rather of the Huguenot stamp than that of the Cavalier, and so I cannot compete therewith as to any of the spicier records of hot youth:  for which indeed let me be thankful.

If then my reader finds me less lively than he had—­shall I say uncharitably?—­hoped for, let him take into account that, to quote the splendid but sensuous phrase of Swinburne, I have always been stupidly prone to prefer “the lilies and languors of virtue” to “the roses and raptures of vice.”

I will now proceed with the self-imposed duty of recording my authorial performances.

CHAPTER XIII.

A MODERN PYRAMID.

In 1839, Rickerby was again my publisher; the new book being “A Modern Pyramid; to Commemorate a Septuagint of Worthies.”  In this volume, commencing with Abel, and ending with Felix Neff, I have greeted both in verse and prose threescore and ten of the Excellent of the earth.  Probably the best thing in it is the “Vision Introductory;” and, as the book has been long out of print, I will produce it here as an interesting flight of fancy, albeit somewhat of a long one.  If an author can