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WILLIS'S

CURRENT NOTES:

A SERIES OF ARTICLES

ON

Antiquities, Biography, Beraldry, Bistory, Language,

Literature, Natural Bistory, Copography, Kr.

SELECTED FROM

ORIGINAL LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS

ADDRESSED DURING THE YEAR

1851

то THE PUBLISHER,

G. WILLIS,

GREAT PIAZZA, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON.

MDCCCLII.

BARY

PREFACE.

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WELVE MONTHS' experience has brought with it the satisfactory conviction that the addition which appeared in January last to Willis's Price Current of Literature, under the title of "Notes for the Month," has proved generally acceptable to his customers; so much so, indeed, as to induce him to print upon superior paper in a collected form, a small edition of his Current Notes for 1851, separately from his monthly issues of the Price Current of Literature and Catalogue of Books on Sale, the new series of which has now reached its fifty-seventh number.

That all the Notes circulated by G. WILLIS deserve preservation he does not presume to

assert; for many of them possessed only a temporary interest; nor was it to be expected that in the course of a rapid selection of between four and five hundred paragraphs from more than as many thousand letters, containing orders, inquiries, and business communications, written by parties in various parts of the globe, grades of life, and of different tastes and opinions, that sympathy of interest or equality of style could be maintained. Still as it often happened that a crude conjecture, or what appeared to be a trifling observation, frequently elicited agreeable, novel, and sometimes important information, selection became so difficult a task, and one which however judiciously performed would have broken the link of ideal connection, that G. W. determined upon the re-issue of his Notes as they originally appeared.

And now, in reviewing these communications, some of them upon controverted questions in

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G. WILLIS has only one thing to regret, that any statement, observation, or even jocular remark which may have been forced upon him by circumstances, or have been inadvertently admitted, should have been considered objectionable.

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