The _Ingoldsby Legends_ are not only remarkable for their humour; they are equally to be praised for their wonderful versification. That he was a perfect master of the language who could thus use every variety of stanza, and find rhymes for the most extraordinary, even technical words, no one can doubt; there are no harsh lines or imperfect rhymes in the Legends, and the wit and mirth are charmingly blended at times with touching pathos. The poet's antiquarian knowledge gives much effect, also, to his tales, and there is never anything in his most comic relations that would be unworthy the pen of a gentleman and a cultured scholar. England has cause to be proud of such a writer as "Thomas Ingoldsby," otherwise Richard Harris Barham. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. TO RICHARD BENTLEY, ESQ. MY DEAR SIR, I should have replied sooner to your letter, but that the last three days in January are, as you are aware, always dedicated, at the Hall, to an especial _battue_, and the old house is full of shooting-jackets, shot-belts, and "double Joes." Even the women wear percussion caps, and your favourite (?) Rover, who, you may remember, examined the calves of your legs with such suspicious curiosity at Christmas, is as pheasant-mad as if he were a biped, instead of being a genuine four-legged scion of the Blenheim breed. I have managed, however, to avail myself of a lucid interval in the general hallucination, (how the rain _did_ come down on Monday!) and as you tell me the excellent friend whom you are in the habit of styling "a Generous and Enlightened Public" has emptied your shelves of the first edition, and "asks for more," why, I agree with you, it _would_ be a want of _respect_ to that very _respectable_ personification, when furnishing him with a farther supply, not to endeavour at least to amend my faults, which are few, and your own, which are more numerous. I have, therefore, gone to work _con amore_, supplying occasionally on my own part a deficient note, or elucidatory stanza, and on yours knocking out, without remorse, your superfluous i's, and now and then eviscerating your _colon_. My duty to our illustrious friend thus performed, I have a crow to pluck with him,--Why will he persist--as you tell me he does persist--in calling me by all sorts of names but those to which I am entitled by birth and baptism--my "Sponsorial and Patronymic appellations," as Dr. Pangloss has it?--Mrs. Malaprop complains, and with justice, of an "assault upon her parts of speech:" but to attack one's very existence--to deny that one _is_ a person _in esse_, and scarcely to admit that one _may_ be a person _in posse_, is tenfold cruelty;--"it is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging!"--let me entreat all such likewise to remember, that as Shakspeare beautifully expresses himself elsewhere--I give his words as quoted by a very worthy Baronet in a neighbouring county, when protesting against a defamatory placard at a general election--