Thirdly, I know nothing by which I can see more clearly my future reviewer's perplexity for want of _materia peccans_ to censure, than this, that he sticks to such pitiful trifles--in future--as the following evidently are, that I, e. g., have appended this Preface, that I have bound the work in four separate Parts, and by this fourth part have made, for an earlier possessor and bookworm, the sheet-worm[131] of the old edition wholly useless. From the like specimens and sayings, wherewith such a Spartan Ephor Emerepes will rob me of the fourth and highest string, which I stretch on my fiddle full of rising fifths, let the indulgent reader form an idea how the whole of the Review must look. I am ashamed to go on. Fourthly, I find universally, that, if an author in his Preface charges himself with a slight fault, which, however, he himself hardly believes, then the critics forthwith adopt and double this charge, as, among the Romans, a suicide who failed to accomplish the act was afterward regularly executed. If the author, having his eyes thus opened, strikes into another line, and bestows upon himself, beforehand, some praise,--and that not apparent,--_this_ is not even accepted, not to say doubled. In that case the Devil may be speaker of the prologue!-- Meanwhile he seems also to be only Reviewer, and less a sly than a coarse customer. Many and really glaring incivilities, however, I willingly forgive my future reviewer, whereas I pardon nothing to a Gallic or British one, because he knows how one should treat people.--I play with him myself in this anticritique in no specially polite manner, nor do I, as the peasant doffs his hat before higher lightnings, doff mine before his. Besides, the judges after the Special Recension address the defendant as "thou." A mild (critical) winter is unwholesome to him upon whom it comes. For the rest, I simply wait and watch for the hour when I shall be celebrated and have on laurel-leaves: then I shall not, any more than other contemporaries who have now set up laurel-trees, suffer any one to find fault with me; and few will undertake it, just as on pictures which have been smeared with _laurel oil_ no flies alight.