OR

CECIL, A PEER.

WITH

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

SECOND EDITION.

LONDON:

T. AND W. BOONE, NEW BOND STREET.

MDCCCXLII.

390.

PREFACE

TO THE SECOND EDITION.

THANKS, incorruptible and unmisleadable Public,-millions of thanks!-I knew I should be called for.-Though I have allowed you almost to bring down the house with your plaudits ere I obeyed your summons, I retired no further than the side scenes, waiting to be led on by the Manager.-Once more, millions of thanks!

In defiance of the incomprehensive stolidity of the Press, You have done me justice. By You, I have been perspicaciously recognized as the Don Juan of modern prose,-the living, breathing, type of the puppyism of the age; and what Wit, in his wits, but would prefer the favour of the reading, to that of the writing

world? To be bought and read, and only laid on the shelf after being bound in calf and gilt on one's edges, is a sufficient apotheosis for any mortal author.-Think of that, Master Brook!-to be read, and bought in order to be read again!—

That piquancy such as mine would prove too piquant by half for the taste of the Lumber Troop of weekly critics, was scarcely to be doubted. Every dunce of them has accordingly let fly his leaden pellet at me.—The last, -le dernier des derniers,-mistakes me for Lady Lytton Bulwer. "Vulnerant omnes ultima necat!"-woeful annihilation!

From the individual "damn'd to everlasting fame" by Lord Byron, as " that animalcule the Editor of the Literary Gazette," who has been buzzing like a troublesome insect, round the pedestals of the literary celebrities of the last thirty years, up to the rigid, utilitarian, dot-and-carry-one Editor of the Spectator, it was scarcely likely that "CECIL," whether as

man of letters or man of the world, should find indulgence.-But I own I little anticipated they would so nobly and publicly attest my diploma of immortality, by avowing their incapacity to understand a line of my memoirs-I was afraid that, for once in their career, they might affect to enter into a joke. That they should discriminate the nice Philosophy of Fashion developed in the idiosyncrasy of "Cecil Danby," the Birmingham epicurianism of modern coxcombry,-the delicate individualization of French, German, Italian, and English nature, demonstrating that virtue on the banks of the Arno is vice on those of the Thames, and that the tree of knowledge fructifies spontaneously in tropical climates, whose roots ripen and decay in England in a compost of gold;-that they should discern the depth of my erudition rather through the classical shaping of my mind than by a few pedantic citations, was of course out of the question. But I did conceive they might find