for which any candid critic was bound to thank the author, even as in Romany Rye there is a fact connected with Iro Norman Myth, for the disclosing of which, any person who pretends to have a regard for literature is bound to thank him, namely, that the mysterious Finn or Fingal of “Ossian’s Poems” is one and the same person as the Sigurd Fofnisbane of the Edda and the Wilkina, and the Siegfried Horn of the Lay of the Niebelungs.

The writer might here conclude, and, he believes, most triumphantly; as, however, he is in the cue for writing, which he seldom is, he will for his own gratification, and for the sake of others, dropping metaphors about vipers and serpents, show up in particular two or three sets or cliques of people, who, he is happy to say, have been particularly virulent against him and his work, for nothing indeed could have given him greater mortification than their praise.

In the first place, he wishes to dispose of certain individuals who call themselves men of wit and fashion—­about town—­who he is told have abused his book “vaustly”—­their own word.  These people paint their cheeks, wear white kid gloves, and dabble in literature, or what they conceive to be literature.  For abuse from such people, the writer was prepared.  Does any one imagine that the writer was not well aware, before he published his book, that, whenever he gave it to the world, he should be attacked by every literary coxcomb in England who had influence enough to procure the insertion of a scurrilous article in a magazine or newspaper!  He has been in Spain, and has seen how invariably the mule attacks the horse; now why does the mule attack the horse?  Why, because the latter carries about with him that which the envious hermaphrodite does not possess.

They consider, forsooth, that his book is low—­but he is not going to waste words about them—­one or two of whom, he is told, have written very duncie books about Spain, and are highly enraged with him, because certain books which he wrote about Spain were not considered duncie.  No, he is not going to waste words upon them, for verily he dislikes their company, and so he’ll pass them by, and proceed to others.

The Scotch Charlie o’er the water people have been very loud in the abuse of Lavengro—­this again might be expected; the sarcasms of the Priest about the Charlie o’er the water nonsense of course stung them.  Oh! it is one of the claims which Lavengro has to respect, that it is the first, if not the only work, in which that nonsense is, to a certain extent, exposed.  Two or three of their remarks on passages of Lavengro, he will reproduce and laugh at.  Of course your Charlie o’er the water people are genteel exceedingly, and cannot abide anything low.  Gypsyism they think is particularly low, and the use of gypsy words in literature beneath its gentility; so they object to gypsy words being used in Lavengro where gypsies are introduced speaking—­“What