Who would have thought it of Cicero (if he had not read it) that a man of so many years and so much sense would sit down in his St. John's Island, and manufacture _beginnings_, introductions, pre-existing germs in advance for the market? However, the man had this advantage, that when he wrote a torso on any subject, he had his choice among the heads lying ready made to his hand, of which he could screw one on to the trunk according to the corpuscular philosophy.--As to myself, who have nothing sedate about me, no one can wonder that I on my Moluccian Frascati[73] have reeled and twisted beforehand whole skeins of beginnings. When Spitz afterward brings a Dog-day, I have already commenced it, and have nothing to do but just to clap the historical remnant on to the introduction.--This very beginning itself I have selected for to-day. At first, however, I had a mind, to be sure, to take this one:-- Nothing torments me about my whole book except my anxiety as to how I shall be translated. This anxiety is not to be blamed in an author, when one sees how the French translate the Germans, and the Germans the Ancients. At bottom it really amounts to one's being expounded by the lower classes and their teachers. I can compare those readers and these classes, in respect of their spiritual fare, which passes first through so many intermediate members, to nothing, except to the poor people in Lapland. When the rich in that country intoxicate themselves in the tippling-room with a liquor which is decocted out of the costly toadstool, the poor people watch around the house-door, till a Lap in easy circumstances comes out and makes----; this translated beverage, the _Vulgate_ of distilled liquor, the poor devils enjoy greatly. This beginning, however, I am keeping for the Preface to a translation. It is one of the juggling tricks and _lusus naturæ_ of chance, of which there are very many, that I should begin this Book just in the night of St. Philip's and St. James's day, 1793, when Victor undertook the witch's-journey to the Maienthal Blocksberg, into the midst of the enchanters and enchantresses, and when, in 1792, he arrived from Göttingen.