I would that I could affirm with Falstaff in the play, “I am not only witty in myself, but I am likewise the cause that wit is in other men.” But the protasis will, I fear, be doubted by the judicious, and my own observation tells me that the apodosis is false. I am naturally neither contemptuous nor malicious, but when I look around me, and behold so many with but two ideas, “one for superfluity and one for use,” and reflect that I may myself rank among that soulless number, I become almost a misanthrope, and quite a scorner. “Les diseurs des bons mots,” says Pascal, “sont mauvais caractères.” “The perpetrators of witticisms are bad men.” Yet the same author observes, that silence is the severest punishment, and, since novelty is all that can gain one notoriety at the present day, I know not why I should not attempt to be new, at least, if not witty. I sometimes think I would rather give utterance to a brilliant error than a stupid truth, and, like Tully, espouse falsehood with a Plato, rather than be right with the rabble. “Had the nose of Cleopatra been shorter,” remarks an eminent writer, “the face of the world had been altered.” (_Her_ face would have been, at any rate.) Had I, too, been born at an earlier era, before the fingers of a million had compressed every square inch of this vast globe’s surface, till it is as dry and hopeless as the peel of an eviscerated orange, I, too, might have been at once original and wise. But all truths have of late become _truisms_, and to reiterate them would be like praising Shakspeare. Sufficient be it for me, (you will find the thought somewhere in Irving,) if, like a skillful physician, who gives you a pill enveloped in some palate-tickling sauce, I now and then, under the guise of folly, pop down your throat a sound moral, or a wholesome truth. My writings, if less grave in appearance, will be more healthful in effect than Bellamy’s learned computation of the earth’s inhabitants during the millennium, (whom he makes so numerous that they would be compelled to lie in _strata_,) or the labored inquiry of the ingenious Spaniard, whether it be more certain that a _cause_ will produce an _effect_, or that an _effect_ must spring from a _cause_. Pardon these patch-work prolegomena--remembering that it is my fashion to place my thoughts in _Mosaic_--and pass on to my compeers of the club.