“By the deep _nine_!” sings out the old bald _Count Fathom_ with the lead-line: no great lapse in the world’s chronology, but a space of infinite importance in individual history. For instance, it has wrought a serious change on the body, if not on the mind, of your very humble servant;--it is not, however, to bespeak your sympathy, or to indulge in what Lord Byron calls “the gloomy vanity of drawing from self,” that I allude to my personal experience. The Scot and lot character of the dispensation, forbids me to think that the world in general can be particularly interested in the state of my Household Sufferage, or that the public ear will be as open to my Maladies as to my Melodies. The simple truth is, that, being a wiser but not sadder man, I propose to admit you to my Private View of a system of Practical Cheerful Philosophy, thanks to which, perchance, the cranium of your Humorist is still secure from such a lecture as was delivered over the skull of Poor Yorick. In the absence of a certain thin “blue-and-yellow” visage, and attenuated figure,--whose effigies may one day be affixed to the present work,--you will not be prepared to learn that some of the merriest effusions in the forthcoming numbers have been the relaxations of a gentleman literally enjoying bad health--the carnival, so to speak, of a personified Jour Maigre. The very fingers so aristocratically slender, that now hold the pen, hint plainly of the “_ills_ that _flesh_ is heir to:”--my coats have become great coats, my pantaloons are turned into trousers, and, by a worse bargain then Peter Schlemihl’s, I seem to have retained my shadow and sold my substance. In short, as happens to prematurely old port wine, I am of a bad colour with very little body. But what then? That emaciated hand still lends a hand to embody in words and sketches the creations or recreations of a Merry Fancy: those gaunt sides yet shake heartily as ever at the Grotesques and Arabesques and droll Picturesques that my Good Genius (a Pantagruelian Familiar) charitably conjures up to divert me from more sombre realities. It was the whim of a late pleasant Comedian, to suppose a set of spiteful imps sitting up aloft, to aggravate all his petty mundane annoyances; whereas I prefer to believe in the ministry of kindlier Elves, that “nod to me and do me courtesies.” Instead of scaring away these motes in the sunbeam, I earnestly invoke them, and bid them welcome; for the tricksy spirits make friends with the animal spirits, and do not I, like a father romping with his own urchins,--do not I forget half my cares whilst partaking in their airy gambols? Such sports are as wholesome for the mind as the other frolics for the body. For on our own treatment of that excellent Friend or terrible Enemy the Imagination, it depends whether we are to be scared and haunted by a Scratching Fanny, or tended by an affectionate Invisible Girl--like an unknown love, blessing us with “favours secret, sweet, and precious,”