Descrizione:
A publisher will not bring out a new edition without a preface, and we find prefaces difficult to write. Three weeks were spent on the preface to Spring Days, for a long screed had been contemplated containing many new and ingenious theories of literature; but as these did not seem to prepare the reader's mind for the book he was going to read, an anecdote was substituted, and a hundred newspapers related that the author had bought up and pilfered as many copies of the original edition as he could, and had thrown them into the Thames. We have nothing so picturesque to tell in the present preface, but merely that the author was sinking in a flood of public disfavour caused by Spring Days, and the book that followed Spring Days (its name we fear to pronounce), when Impressions and Opinions, like a big Newfoundland dog, dived after him and brought him to shore. And all that we have to tell of the further career of this book is that it seems to have retained the admiration it first inspired, and to have made some friends in the last twenty years. |
