My reader, young or old, will please to observe that I have left myself entire freedom as to the sources of what may be said over the teacups.  I have not told how many cups are commonly on the board, but by using the plural I have implied that there is at least one other talker or listener beside myself, and for all that appears there may be a dozen.  There will be no regulation length to my reports,—­no attempt to make out a certain number of pages.  I have no contract to fill so many columns, no pledge to contribute so many numbers.  I can stop on this first page if I do not care to say anything more, and let this article stand by itself if so minded.  What a sense of freedom it gives not to write by the yard or the column!

When one writes for an English review or magazine at so many guineas a sheet, the temptation is very great to make one’s contribution cover as many sheets as possible.  We all know the metallic taste of articles written under this powerful stimulus.  If Bacon’s Essays had been furnished by a modern hand to the “Quarterly Review” at fifty guineas a sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!

The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my slight project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I may have said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in these or other pages.  When it suddenly flashes into the consciousness of a writer who had been long before the public, “Why, I have said all that once or oftener in my books or essays, and here it is again; the same old thought, the same old image, the same old story!” it irritates him, and is likely to stir up the monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary.  He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they say to themselves, “We have had all that before,” and turn to another writer’s performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous.  This is what the writer says to himself about the reader.

The idiot!  Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all he has written?  Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of his, writer’s, words he may happen to have read?  At one of those famous dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done, Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied to the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson: 

   Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
   Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.