Produced by Anne Soulard, Arno Peters, Tiffany Vergon
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Lasswade, January 8, 1853
I am on the point of revising and considerably altering, forrepublication in England, an edition of such amongst my writings asit may seem proper deliberately to avow. Not that I have any intention,or consciously any reason, expressly to disown any one thing that Ihave ever published; but some things have sufficiently accomplishedtheir purpose when they have met the call of that particular transientoccasion in which they arose; and others, it may be thought on review,might as well have been suppressed from the very first. Things immoralwould of course fall within that category; of these, however, I cannotreproach myself with ever having published so much as one. But evenpure levities, simply as such, and without liability to any worseobjection, may happen to have no justifying principle of life withinthem; and if, any where, I find such a reproach to lie against a paperof mine, that paper I should wish to cancel. So that, upon the whole,my new and revised edition is likely to differ by very considerablechanges from the original papers; and, consequently, to that extentis likely to differ from your existing Boston reprint.
These changes, as sure to be more or less advantageous to the collection,it is my wish to place at your disposal as soon as possible, in orderthat you may make what use of them you see fit, be it little or much. Itmay so happen that the public demand will give you no opportunity forusing them at all. I go on therefore to mention, that over and abovethese changes, which may possibly strike you as sometimes mere caprices,pulling down in order to rebuild, or turning squares into rotundas,(diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis,) it is my purpose toenlarge this edition by as many new papers as I find available for such astation. These I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, sofar as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any viewto further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which youhave already rendered me; viz., first, in having brought together sowidely scattered a collection—a difficulty which in my own hands by toopainful an experience I had found from nervous depression to beabsolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator inthe pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation orthe shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that Icould plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and merelyupon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, I hope, willnot be without their value in the eyes of those who have taken aninterest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad, they arenow tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the Messrs.TICKNOR, REED, & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of any power tomake such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or custom inAmerica.
I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriesttrifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express mysense of the liberality mani