THE AUTHOR RELATES SOME ANECDOTES, REFERS TO AN OPINION EXPRESSED BY A CRITIC ON THE PRESENT OPUS, AND DESCANTS THEREON. Every man can say B to a battledore, and write in praise of virtue and the seven liberal sciences; thresh corn out of full sheaves, and fetch water out of the Thames. But out of dry stubble to make an after-harvest, and a plentiful crop without sowing, and wring juice out of a flint, that is Pierce a God's name, and the right trick of a workman. NASH. There is an anecdote related of the Speaker in one of Queen Elizabeth's Parliaments, who when the Queen, during a session in which small progress had been made in the public business, asked him what the House had got through, made answer, “May it please your Majesty, eight weeks.” In like manner, if it be asked what I have got through in the prosecution of this my Opus, I reply, “May it please your Readership, four volumes.” This brings to my recollection another anecdote, which though not matter of history like the former, is matter of fact, and occurred in the good town of Truro. A lady in that town hired a servant, who at the time of hiring thought herself bound to let the lady know that she had once “had a misfortune.” When she had been some time in service, she spoke of something to her Mistress, inadvertently, as having happened just after the birth of her first child. Your first! said the Lady; why how many have you had then?—Oh Ma'am said she, I've had four. Four! exclaimed the Mistress; why you told me you had had but one. However I hope you mean to have no more. Ma'am, replied the woman, that must be as it may please God. “We are” says Lord Camelford, “as it pleases God,—and sometimes as it displeases him.” The reflection is for every one; but the anecdote is recommended to the special notice of a Critic on the Athenæum establishment, who in delivering his opinion upon the third volume of this Opus, pronounced it to be “clear to him,” that the Author had “expended” on the two former, “a large portion of his intellectual resources, no less than of his lengthy common-place book.” The aforesaid Critic has also pronounced that the Opus entitled The Doctor might have been and ought to have been a Novel. _Might_ have been is one consideration, _ought_ to have been is another, and whether it would have been better that it _should_ have been, is a third; but without discussing either of these propositions, because as Calderon says, _Sobre impossibles y falsas proposiciones, no hai argumento;_ without, I say, enquiring into what might, would, could, or should have been, neither of which imports of the preterperfect tense, optative, potential or subjunctive, are suitable to the present case, the Author of this Opus replies to the aforesaid Critic's assertion that the Opus might have been a Novel,—That, Sir, _must_ have been as it pleased ME.