F353 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1836 BY JAMES HALL, in the Clerk's Office for the District Court of Ohio. PREFACE. We have no particular partiality for the task of writing a preface.. It is a ceremony imposed by custom, and is in general as irksome to. the writer, as it is useless to the reader of the work, to which it is appended. Publishers, however, have their own notions of what is proper, and in their apprehension the preface is a component part of a well gotten up book, and may not be dispensed with without a departure from a long standing and inflexible law of their profession. We hold a different faith, and are bold enough to avow our belief, that if there be an abuse in literature, demanding above all others to be submitted to the process of immediate abolition, it is this one of forcing an author to supply his own book with a letter of introduction. For such, in practice, is most usually the substance of a preface. It is a brief history of the birth and parentage of the book, wherein it is expected th the author shall explain why it was written, and wherefore it has been published, with various other matters of no importance whatever in themselves, and of no interest to any, except the party thus offending against good manners and correct taste. The only valuable quality that we have ever been discerning enough to discover in a preface, is the opportunity which it affords to a modest author to herald the peculiar reluctance with which he does an act that is entirely voluntary on his part, and which he undertakes with the greatest apparent self complacency. In these brief pages we read volumes of evidence in favor of the patriotism and benevolence of authors; and we cannot but honor a race so prolific in good offices, performed from the most amiable motives, yet attended with embarrassing circumstances of bashfulness and self abasement. We gather from these candid fragments of literary history, that books are usually written merely to fill up a leisure hour, or to gratify the author's propensity for some favorite study, without the most distant intention of publication, and that they are only given to the public at the earnest solicitation of partial friends, or from an amiable desire to be useful to a world which is seldom grateful for the liberal self sacrifices thus, made. The man who in this manner gives to a thankless public the treasured gleanings of his secret hours of joy-the record of his pri vate thoughts and studies-the unpremeditated out-pourings of his mind, or the choice reflections of his wisest and saddest momentsmerely to gratify his friends, and to instruct the community, must be very philanthropic indeed. Nor is this all. The history of books, as developed in prefaces, discloses further, that they are, for the most, part, very hastily written, and full of imperfections, notwithstanding |