There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we live over again the author's lonely labours and tremulous hopes; we see him, on his first appearance after parturition, 'as well as could be expected,' a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the author of the _Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry_, or of the _Unities briefly considered by Philomusus_, of which they have never heard and never will so much as hear the names; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman's library can be complete without; we see the spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial-flowers of some passion smothered while the Stuarts were not yet unkinged, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association.--J. R. LOWELL. _Library of Old Authors._ TO MY BOOK It will be looked for, book, when some but see Thy title, Epigrams, and named of me, Thou shouldst be bold, licentious, full of gall, Wormwood and sulphur, sharp, and toothed withal, Become a petulant thing, hurl ink and wit As madmen stones; not caring whom they hit. Deceive their malice, who could wish it so; And by thy wiser temper let men know Thou art not covetous of least self-fame, Made from the hazard of another's shame: Much less with lewd, profane, and beastly phrase, To catch the world's loose laughter, or vain gaze. He that departs with his own honesty For vulgar praise, doth it too dearly buy. BEN JONSON. HIS PRAYER FOR ABSOLUTION For those my unbaptizèd rhymes, Writ in my wild unhallowed times; For every sentence, clause, and word, That's not inlaid with thee, my Lord, Forgive me, God, and blot each line Out of my book that is not thine. But if, 'mongst all, thou findst here one Worthy thy benediction; That one of all the rest shall be The glory of my work and me.