persons without the education and sentiments of gentlemen and ladies, thrust into circumstances in which, with the allowable partiality of self-estimation, they fancy themselves to belong to that rank, and ape the fashionable amusements of their betters: where, perhaps, the widow of a rich grocer, or the dashing daughter of mine host, now a _gemman_ and an Esquire, by noise and glare, and affectation, hope to make you forget the signs of the three sugar-loaves, or the _hog in armour_: to such impotent attempts of inveterate and incurable vulgarity, to pass for gentility, the description in question either applies generally, as was intended, or does not apply at all. One thing, I observed, that the wise and good characters in that production, have not been applied by _friends_. In the work that I now offer to the public, from former experience of misinterpretation, I have been more scrupulously cautious to guard against any possibility of individual application. In the former novel, I merely took care not to copy a fool, a coxcomb, a debauchee, or a knave, or any other character of a ridiculous or bad kind, from any persons known to me for these qualifications. Still, however, from _inadvertence_, I did take a feature or two here and there, that I grieve to acknowledge, on perusing the picture after it was finished, struck me with a likeness in some lineament. In the present novel, I have been much more vigilantly cautious. I not only have not copied fools, &c. from persons known to me to be such, but in drawing any character of that or the other _equivalent_ classes, I have carefully run my memory over the individuals that I know to belong to these, and have studiously avoided _treading on their sore heel_. The end of this work being to give a view of modern literature, I, conformably to fact, represent several men of extraordinary talents and erudition; many more of respectable, but not extraordinary talents and erudition, and a considerable number of literary and other book-makers, without either talents or erudition. In this last class of representation, have I exerted my principal care to shun individual reference; and when drawing a picture of a literary dunce, the following has been my method, and I hope it has succeeded.