Or, having in his mind the stolidity of those, who condescended gravely to condemn so trifling a _jeu d’esprit_, he might have taken to his aid a sarcasm from Smollett--“Some formidable critics declared that the work was void of humor, character, and sentiment.” Or, revolving in his thoughts the mystery attending the appearance of the first number, and the pining curiosity excited to unveil its paternity, with flattered pride, he might have quoted a splendid sentence from Count Fathom--“Over and above this important secret, under which he was begotten, other particularities attended his birth, and seemed to mark him out as uncommon among the sons of men.”--These “_ancient_ instances” will suffice, my reader, if you are in a yielding mood, to convince you that, if Tristram is called upon somewhat often, it is less a matter of necessity, than of choice. I am doubting whether it would not be a most Machiavelian stroke of diplomatic wisdom, to persuade you that I perceive all my failings. Surely your admiration at my frankness would outweigh your anger at the repetition of my sins. I am sometimes affected, and, now and then, I perpetrate a _verbicide_. I like to make new words--I feel for them the affection of a father. I am slightly tinctured with the sin mentioned by Boileau. (L’Art Poetique. Chant Troisieme.) “Souvent, sans y penser, un écrivain qui s’aime, Forme tous ses héros semblables à soi-meme.” Which lines the _Il_-literati are to know mean, “A self-complacent writer often inadvertently draws his heroes like himself.” Thus I, forgetting the precise terms of the _conversators_, (there _ought_ to be such a word,) make them parley in a brogue very like my own. I am, moreover, somewhat vain, though less so than Ovid, or Horace, (Vide Metam. lib. 15. in fine. and Hor. 2.20 3.30.) or than that Etrurian Spurinna, whom Valerius Maximus cites as an instance of modesty, though he was rather an example of uncommon self-inflation; since he thought himself so _killing_, that he disfigured his face, lest he should unwittingly seduce his fair country-women!