This trifle, begun to please only myself and my own private fancy, was laid on the shelf. But some friends, who had seen it, induced me, by dint of saying they liked it, to put it in print. That is, having come to that very conclusion, I asked their advice when ’t would make no confusion. For though (in the gentlest of ways) they had hinted it was scarce worth the while, I should doubtless have printed it. I began it, intending a Fable, a frail, slender thing, rhyme-ywinged, with a sting in its tail. But, by addings and alterings not previously planned, digressions chance-hatched, like birds’ eggs in the sand, and dawdlings to suit every whimsey’s demand (always freeing the bird which I held in my hand, for the two perched, perhaps out of reach, in the tree),--it grew by degrees to the size which you see. I was like the old woman that carried the calf, and my neighbors, like hers, no doubt, wonder and laugh; and when, my strained arms with their grown burthen full, I call it my Fable, they call it a bull. Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a style that is neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a person whom nobody knows, some people will say I am rather more free with my readers than it is becoming to be, but I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in following wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in short, I take more than a young author’s lawful ease and laugh in a queer way so like Mephistopheles, that the Public will doubt, as they grope through my rhythm, if in truth I am making fun _of_ them or _with_ them. So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of my book is already secured. For there is not a poet throughout the whole land but will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation of being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut up and abused in it. Now, I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are something like ten thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review and Magazine critics call _lofty_ and _true_, and about thirty thousand (_this_ tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed _full of promise and pleasing_. The Public will see by a glance at this schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about courting _them_, since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of for boiling my pot.