“Barabbas Whitefeather.
“P.S.—You know I never liked shaving; the chin’s bad enough—but when it comes to the head, it’s ‘regular cruelty to animals.’”
The above is (“errors excepted”) a true copy of the Captain’s letter. He died in—I regret to say I cannot give the exact latitude: suffice it to say he died; but left behind him what, I trust, will prove an imperishable monument of his social worth and his exalted genius.—John Jackdaw, Ed.]
THE EDITOR’S CHAPTER TO THE READER
The reader has, probably, marked a variety of style in the foregoing pages. The Editor feels it to be due as much to the lamented Captain Whitefeather as to himself to state that he, John Jackdaw, is solely responsible for the manner in which this work is presented to all the eyes of the British public.
Nature had been very prodigal to the Captain; but whether from the extreme vivacity of his genius, or whether from a more hidden cause, it is vain to search, the Captain, with all his debts, owed nothing to art. Even his orthography was of the happiest originality.
The Editor, therefore, felt the peculiar delicacy of his task. Had he printed the MS. as it came, with the bloom upon it, from the Captain’s hand, it was to be feared that in this age of light reading—which reading, like pills, is made to be bolted, not, like bread, to be carefully chewed—not one out of a hundred would have had the necessary patience to go through with it. To suppress the work for any defect of style would have been to sacrifice, as the Editor considered, a great national good. After much deliberation there appeared to him a golden mean. It struck the Editor that he might, in very many instances, give the style of Whitefeather, whilst in very many more he might heighten, and adorn, and vary it from his own poor resources. Still, be it understood, all the facts are Whitefeather’s; the Editor only lays claim to certain tropes, and metaphors, and inimitable felicities of expression, to which, probably, it might be considered indelicate were he more emphatically to allude. Indeed, he has only touched upon the theme in the way of business; as there may be, even at this moment, many noble and distinguished authors who, “wanting the accomplishment” of grammar, are yet desirous of appearing in print. (To these, in parenthesis, the author addresses himself; assuring the tadpole literati that he finishes tales, histories, biographies, poems, etc., with all despatch, and with the most inviolable secrecy. His address is in a former page, and Breakneck Steps is too well known to all who would mount Parnassus.)
To the publishers of the remains of Captain Whitefeather the Editor has to express his warmest gratitude. The Editor blushes for the intelligence of the trade, when he states that this national work, like the hitherto inimitable Robinson Crusoe, was offered in the humblest manner to twenty houses, and, sometimes coldly, sometimes sulkily, sometimes indignantly refused.
One was tickled by the title, but looked blank when he understood that there was no murderer—no highwayman in it. He declared that the only way to keep a reader awake was to commit at least one murder in every page; that the gallows was now the only bay tree, and that even the youthful generation sucked intelligence and morals from tales of the gibbet, with the same eagerness and the same advantage that they sucked liquorice root! “Season it, sir—season it,” said one bland gentleman, “with a handful of murders—a terrific storm on the New River—and a miraculous escape from Marylebone watchhouse, and there may be some hopes of it.” A second asked me to change the title into “The Handbook of the Money Markets,” adding, to my astonishment, that he had no doubt the staple of the matter would serve equally well. A third—but why should I enumerate the rebuffs endured? No; let me rather, in the name of an obliged generation, register a gratitude to the enlightened spirit under whose auspices the book appears—a work destined, as the Editor with all diffidence declares, to work a good as incalculable as, perhaps, unknown!