"I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed or explicit manner with my two latest _opuscula_, or little works; the elder of the two is, curiously enough, called 'Dog Post Days,' and the later 'Flower-pieces.' Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea to-night of the principal points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it's my fault alone, and nobody else's, if you find you don't quite know what the first of the two may be _about_--whether you are to suppose it to be a work on heraldry or on insects--or a dictionary of some particular dialect--or an ancient codex--or a Lexicon Homericum--or a collection of inaugural disputations--or a ready reckoner--or an epic poem--or a volume of funeral sermons. It really _is_ nothing but an interesting story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book's favour that there are parts of it to be found--I hope not very many--in which there are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case), though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which so often _seem_ as if they really must have been written by the old _artless_ knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)--that my attempts, I say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do not offend the ears of the great--but only those of the chaste--are not considered the most objectionable."