Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a style that is neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a person whom nobody knows, some people will say I am rather more free with my readers than it is becoming to be, that I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in following wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in short, I take more than a young author's lawful ease, and laugh in a queer way so like Mephistopheles, that the public will doubt, as they grope through my rhythm, if in truth I am making fun _at_ them or _with_ them. So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of my book is already secured. For there is not a poet throughout the whole land, but will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation of being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut-up and abused in it. Now, I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are something like ten thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review and Magazine critics call _lofty_ and _true_, and about thirty thousand (_this_ tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed _full of promise_ and _pleasing_. The Public will see by a glance at this schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about courting _them_, since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of for boiling my pot. As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned once in my pages, with praises or blames, let them |SEND IN THEIR CARDS|, without further |DELAY|, to my friend |G. P. Putnam|, Esquire, in Broadway, where a |LIST| will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour of receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time, (that is, if their names can be twisted in rhyme,) I will honestly give each his |PROPER POSITION|, at the rate of |ONE AUTHOR| to each |NEW EDITION|. Thus a PREMIUM is offered sufficiently |HIGH| (as the magazines say when they tell their best lie) to induce bards to |CLUB| their resources and buy the balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly been run through the mill. One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read books with something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the country, perhaps, there are two, including myself, gentle reader, and you. All the characters sketched in this slight _jeu d'esprit_, though, it may be, they seem, here and there, rather free, and drawn from a Mephistophelian stand-point, are _meant_ to be faithful, and that is the grand point, and none but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells you, without any subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes' tub. A PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION,