"If men delight to read Tupper both in England and America, why should they not study him both in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth? The judgment of persons who are more or less free from insular prejudices is said in some degree to anticipate that which is admitted to be the conclusive verdict of posterity."—Saturday Review.
"The popularity of the 'Proverbial Philosophy' of Martin Tupper is a gratifying and healthy symptom of the present taste in literature, the book being full of lessons of wisdom and piety, conveyed in a style startling at first by its novelty, but irresistibly pleasing by its earnestness and eloquence."—Literary Gazette.
"Mr. Mill, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Browning, Mr. Morris, Mr. Rossetti—all these writers have a wider audience in America than in England. So too has Mr. Tupper. The imagination staggers in attempting to realise the number of copies of his works which have been published abroad. Unlike most of his contemporaries, further, he has conquered popularity in both hemispheres. He has won the suffrages of two great nations. He may now disregard criticism."—Daily News.
This sonnet, written and published in 1837, nearly half a century ago, explains itself and may fairly come in here as a protest and prophecy by a then young author. And, nota bene, if hyper-criticism objects that a sonnet must always be a fourteen-liner (this being one only of twelve) I reply that it is sometimes of sixteen, as in the one by Dante to Madonna, which I have translated in my "Modern Pyramid:" and there are instances of twelve, as one at least of Shakespeare's in his Passionate Pilgrim. But this is a small technicality.
To my Book "Proverbial Philosophy," before Publication.
"My soul's own son, dear image of my mind,
I would not without blessing send thee forth
Into the bleak wide world, whose voice unkind
Perchance will mock at thee as nothing worth;
For the cold critic's jealous eye may find
In all thy purposed good little but ill,
May taunt thy simple garb as quaintly wrought,
And praise thee for no more than the small skill
Of masquing as thine own another's thought:
What then? count envious sneers as less than nought:
Fair is thine aim,—and having done thy best,
So, thus I bless thee; yea, thou shalt be blest!"
There were also two others afterward, in the jubilate vein; but I spare my reader, albeit they are curiously prophetic of the wide good-doing since accomplished.
To the above numerous commendations which indeed might be indefinitely extended, it is only fair to add that "Proverbial Philosophy" has run the gauntlet of both hemispheres also in the way of parody, ridicule, plagiaristic imitation, and in some instances of envious and malignant condemnation. It has won on each side both praise from the good and censure from the bad: our comic papers have amused us with its travesties—as Church Liturgies and Holy Writ have been similarly parodied,—and some of the modern writers who are unfriendly to Christian influences have done their small endeavour to damage both the book and its author through adverse criticism. But their efforts are vain. They have availed only to advance—from first to last now for some forty-five years—the world-wide success of "Proverbial Philosophy."
If it is expected, as a matter of impartiality, that I should here print adverse criticisms as well as those which are favourable, I simply decline to be so foolish: a caricature impresses where a portrait is forgotten: the litera scripta in printer's ink remains and is quotable for ever, and I do not think it worth while deliberately to traduce myself and my book children by adopting the opinions of dyspeptic scribes who will find how well I think of them in my Proverbial Essay "Zoilism;" which, by the way, I read at St. Andrews, before some chiefs of that university, with A. K. H. B. in the chair.