And now lastly, I want to make the ethics of my position in this matter clear. I did not think for an instant that I had any right to give even a few of these papers to the public. It was to me a breach of trust. However, after more than a year of bickering with my conscience, I have reasoned myself out of that position. Perhaps the very words of Dunlevy’s letter, “these papers become yours to do with them what you will,” showed that he had an idea of their publication. I doubt that, though I must confess that he makes occasional allusions in the writings themselves which would tend toward that opinion. What prevailed upon me in the end was their value, for value I felt they had. Whether they would excite general interest was no concern of mine. If they are of value, why then I feel that I have no exclusive right to them. I wish it distinctly understood that I do not publish them as possessing literary merit, but as writings which will help to depict the character of a man who had had unusual potentialities, and wasted them as a result of the incidents and habits of his early life. These fragments have but one real value--the portrayal of a man bordering upon insanity, fighting to maintain his balance in the midst of bitterness, and struggling to prove to himself that he had reasons for becoming a dissipated wreck. We look about us and we see many really brilliant men who go down to self defeat. Why is this? We do not know. But Dunlevy’s fragments are descriptive of the mental condition of one amongst them. It is due him to add that he is conscious of his own shortcomings, for he himself gives these papers their title. To sum up, it is as if his book were a diary of visions, without days or dates or places, having no connections, no continuity, no coherence, no unity--except for being the work of one author, that morbidly sensitive, disappointed, solitary pessimist, William Wirt Dunlevy. It may be said of my introduction that I have erected a large portico to a small dwelling. That may be; but it was once the spiritual abode of a lonely man. The specimens that I am about to give are taken at random; for I repeat that his writings in their original form had no evident arrangement. In Dunlevy’s book they are merely separated by the end of a leaf or a blank in the page. Nothing connects them but the fact that they were written in one volume by one man. The Roman numerals which I have placed on the successive blank pages are to indicate, therefore, that there was a break in his manuscript. The following is the first in his book. The Memoirs of a Failure I