But when the Tome is ended, then begins--this is the last nominal definition--a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my _honey-moons_, because I make less honey therein than I eat, busily employed, not as a working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb. Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,' Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened? As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the _contrat-social_ among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always stick to the subject-matter,--which is the history,--because otherwise people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this, that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty volumes, or even a longer one,--as in this, for instance,--thinks or laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,--which sentence has been already executed on me more than once. Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present reduced to a prescriptive right and confirmed into a servitude, the reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,--as I do here,--have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a matter of course, not only the _tribute_ as _alms_, but also the _don gratuit_ as _quarterly assessment_. So does not merely the cultivated Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.