An Authors Mind | Page 2

permission,
after modest reluctance pretty well enacted, to transform the deformity
of manuscript into the well-proportioned elegance of print. But, this

much gained, our author would not yield to any argument we could
urge upon the next point, viz: leave to produce the volume, duly
fathered with his name. "Not he indeed; he loved quiet too well; he
might, it was true, secretly like the bantling, but cared not to
acknowledge it before a populous reading-world, every individual
whereof esteems himself and herself competent to criticize!" Mr.
Publisher, deeply disinterested, of course, bristled up at the notion of
any thing anonymous; and the only alternative remaining was the stale
expedient of an editor; that editor, in brief, to be none other than myself,
a very palpable-obscure: and let this excuse my name upon the
title-page.
Now, as editor, I have had to do--what seems, by the way, to be
regarded by collective wisdom as the best thing possible--nothing: my
author would not suffer the change of a syllable, for all his seeming
carelessness about the THING, as he called it; so, I had no more for my
part than humbly to act the Helot, and try to set decently upon the
public tables a genuine mess of Spartan porridge.
M. F. T.
Albury, Guildford.

AN AUTHOR'S MIND:
THE
BOOK OF TITLE-PAGES.

A RAMBLE.
In these days of universal knowledge, schoolmaster and scholars all
abroad together, quotation is voted pedantry, and to interpret is
accounted an impertinence; yet will I boldly proclaim, as a mere fact,
clear to the perceptions of all it may concern, "This book deserves

richly of the Sosii." And that for the best of reasons: it is not only a
book, but a book full of books; not merely a new book, but a
little-library of new books; thirty books in one, a very harvest of
epitomized authorship, the cream of a whole fairy dairy of quiescent
post-octavos. It is not--O, mark ye this, my Sosii, (and by the way,
gentle ladies, these were worshipful booksellers of old, the Murrays
and the Bentleys of imperial Rome,)--it is not the dull concreted
elongation of one isolated hackneyed idea--supposing in every work
there be one, a charitable hypothesis--wire-drawn, and coaxed, and
hammered through three regulation volumes; but the
scarcely-more-than-hinted abstractions of some forty thousand flitting
notions--hasty, yet meditative Hamlets; none of those lengthy, drawling
emblems of Laertes--driven in flocks to the net of the fowler, and
penned with difficult compression within these modest limits. So "goe
forth, littel boke," and make thyself a friend among those good
husbandmen, who tend the trees of knowledge, and bring their fruit to
the world's market.
Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself: here
beginneth the trouble of authorship, but it is a trouble causing ease;
ease from thoughts--thoughts--thoughts, which never cease to make
one's head ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night
and reveries by day, (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion's
children, or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army,) harassing
the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, a definite life;
ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum of aërial
forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded. O, happy unimaginable
vacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want of thought! O, mental
holiday, now as impossible to me, as to take a true school-boy's interest
in rounders and prisoner's base! An author's mind--and remember
always, friend, I write in character, so judge not as egotistic vanity
merely the well playing of my rôle--such a mind is not a sheet of
smooth wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions; no
empty tenement, but a barn stored to bursting: it is a painful pressure,
constraining to write for comfort's sake; an appetite craving to be
satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted; an impetus that longs to get
away, rather than a dormant dynamic: thrice have I (let me confess it)

poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a real author--real,
because for very peace of mind, involuntarily; but still the vessel fills;
still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a better harvest, seeds of
foreign growth; still those Lernæan necks sprout again, claiming with
many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and controvert--to publish
invention, and proscribe error. Truly, it were enviable to be less
apprehensive, less retentive; to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that
penal cask which forty-nine Danaïdes might not keep from leaking; to
be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the
paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and
things, equally with rank and riches, have often cost their full price, as
many mad have known; they take too much out of a