Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.
These papers 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; namely, first, in having brought together sowidely scattered a collection—a difficulty which in my own hands bytoo painful 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 thatI could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely andmerely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, Ihope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who havetaken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good orbad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individualhouse, the Messrs. TICKNOR & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent ofany power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by lawor custom in America.
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 manifested throughout this transaction by yourhonorable house.
Ever believe me, my dear sir,
Your faithful and obliged,
Many of the papers in my collected works were originally written underone set of disadvantages, and are now revised under another. They werewritten generally under great pressure as to time, in order to catch thecritical periods of monthly journals; written oftentimes at a distancefrom the press (so as to have no opportunity for correction); and alwayswritten at a distance from libraries, so that very many statements,references, and citations, were made on the authority of my unassistedmemory. Under such circumstances were most of the papers composed; andthey are now reissued in a corrected form, sometimes even partiallyrecast, under the distraction of a nervous misery which embarrasses myefforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible by words. Such, indeed,is the distress produced by this malady, that, if the present act ofrepublication had in any respect worn the character of an experiment, Ishould have shrunk from it in despondency. But the experiment, so faras there was any, had been already tried for me vicariously amongst theAmericans; a people so nearly repeating our own in style of intellect,and in the composition of their reading class, that a success amongstthem counts for a success amongst ourselves. For some few of theseparate papers in these volumes I make pretensions of a higher cast.These pretensions I will explain hereafter. All the rest I resign to thereader's unbiased judgment, adding here, with respect to four of them,a few prefatory words—not of propitiation or deprecation, but simplyin explanation as to points that would otherwise be open tomisconstruction.