“Why, Mr. Author, you do not mean to say that the book is not printed as a novel, does not appear as one, and is not intended to pass for one. Have you the face to deny it?”
“Lecteur, mon ami, la demande est bien faite sans doute, et bien apparente; mais la response vous contentera, ou j'ai le sens malgallefretu!”
“Lecteur, mon ami! an Incog has no face. But this I say in the face, or in all the faces, of that Public which has more heads than a Hindu Divinity, that the character and contents of the book were fairly, fully, carefully and considerately denoted,—that is to say, notified or made known, in the title-page. Turn to it, I intreat you, Sir! The first thing which you cannot but notice, is, that it is in motley. Ought you not to have inferred, concerning the author, that in his brain
—he hath strange places cramm'd
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms.1
And it you could fail to perceive the conspicuous and capacious
&c.
which in its omnisignificance may promise anything, and yet pledges the writer to nothing; and if you could also overlook the mysterious monograph
your attention was invited to all this by a sentence of Butler's on the opposite page, so apposite that it seems as if he had written it with a second-sight of the application thus to be made of it: ‘There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what to expect from the one as the other.’ This was the remark of one whose wisdom can never be obsolete; and whose wit, though much of it has become so, it will always be worth while for an Englishman to study and to understand.
1 SHAKESPEARE.