Further on the authors in poetic prose say:
"We expect them, who the little book (for the care what we wrote him and for her typographical perfection) that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons and especially of the youth at which we dedicate him particularly."
Ah, how well those dark-eyed dwellers in perpetual summer know how to inspire even the dull and commonplace sentences of a preface with a living, breathing soul! How the threadbare language of apology and modest braggadocio used by the hesitating but puffed up author ever since the first work published by Moses, is made to submit to the tropical influence of sunny Portugal, and comes forth breathing the seductive odors of that glad clime where the poet's song of undying love to the dark-eyed maid is ever throbbing in passionate pulsations upon the perfumed air.
But I must give a Portuguese translation rendered back into English, of the well known anecdote told on the physician who didn't take his own medicine:
"A physician eighty years of age, had enjoyed of a health unalterable. Their friends did him of it compliments every days. 'Mister Doctor,' they said to him, 'you are admirable man. What you make then for to bear as well?' 'I will tell you it, gentlemen,' he was answered them, 'and I exhort you in same time at to follow my example. I live of the product of my ordering without take any remedy who I command to my sicks.'"
One fault with American wit, in my estimation, is its coarseness and lack of polish. I have mentioned it a great many times and wept over it in extreme sorrow. Here, however, we have it down fine. The Portuguese joke is no doubt the most mirth provoking, and at the same time the most refined and delicate joke now made. We send our manufactures to all foreign countries to successfully compete with theirs; but our joke can never hold up its head and ask for the award or bronze medal where these Portuguese rib-ticklers and button-hole busters and suspender wrenchers are allowed to compete for the free for-all prizes. The Portuguese joke with facings of same held in place with bias folds of something else, is really the most recherche joke now on the market. Americans may for years to come be able to furnish a good, fair, stoga joke that will do to stub around home with, but they cannot design a joke that will do to dress up in and wear on great occasions. The low-neck, Oxford-tie, Portuguese burst of humor, hand-sewed, with sole leather counter and steel shank, and with the name of the author blown in the bottle, is bound to command the highest market price for a century or more to come.
We may command the smoking car and Congress trade, but Portugal must furnish the easy riding, gentle, picnic and croquet joke. It may be also fed to invalids with a spoon. A friend of mine who had been sick for nine years took a Portuguese joke that I gave him right out of the can without diluting it, and by that means gradually led up to fricasseed oat-meal gruel stuffed with sawdust and other rich dishes. It saved his life, but his intellect is impaired so that he don't know a calcium light from the splendor of the New Jerusalem.