For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_ editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise, just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about it, that in its case this cannot be done. However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic _changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any others. My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther apart. "On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical _grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!" I just said that I have done so.