An Authors Mind | Page 4

So now, with visor down, and a white shield, as a
young knight-candidate unknown, it pleases my leisure to take my
pastime in the tourney: and so long as in truthful prowess I bear me
gallantly and gently, who is he that hath a right to unlatch my helmet,
or where is the herald that may challenge my rank? Nevertheless,
inquisitive, consider the mysteries that lie in the Turkish-looking
sobriquet of "Mufti;" its vowels and its consonants are full of strict
intention I never saw cause why the most charming of essayists hid
himself in "Elia," but he may for all that have had pregnant reasons;
even so, (but that slender wit could read my riddle,) you shall perhaps
find fault with my Mussulman agnomen; still you and I equally
participate in this shallow secret, and within so brief a word is
concealed the key to unlock the casket that tempts your curiosity:
however, the less said of so diaphanous a mystery, the better.
And let me remark this of the mode anonymous; a mode, indeed, to
purposes of shame, and slander, and falsity of all kinds too often
prostituted for the present, bear with it; sometimes it is well to go
disguised, and the voice of one unseen lacks not eager listeners; we
address your judgment, unbiased by the prejudice or sanction of a name:
we put forth, lightly and negligently, those lesser matters which
opportunity hath not yet matured; we escape the nervous pains, the
literary perils of the hardier acknowledged. Only of this one thing be
sure; we--(no, I; why should unregal, unhierarchal I affect
pluralities?)--I hope to keep inviolate, as much when masked as when

avowed, the laws of truth, charity, sincerity, and honour; and, although,
among my many booklets, the grave and the gay will be found in near
approximation, I trust--will it offend any to tell them that I pray?--to do
no ill service at any time to the cause of that true religion which resents
not the neighbourhood of innocent cheerfulness. I show you, friend, my
honest mind.
I by itself, I; odious mono-literal; thinnest, feeblest, most insignificant
of letters, I dread your egotistic influence as my bane; they will not
suffer you, nor bear with a book so speckled with your presence. Still,
world, hear me; mercifully spare a poor grammarian the penance of
perpetual third persons; let an individual tender conscience escape
censure for using the true singular in preference to that imposing lie,
the plural. Suffer a humble unit to speak of himself as I, and, once for
all, let me permissively disclaim intentional self-conceit in the needful
usage of isolated I-ship.
These few preliminaries being settled, though I fear little to the
satisfaction of either party concerned, let us proceed--further to
preliminarize; for you will find, even to the end, as you may have
found out already from the beginning, that your white knight is
mounted rather on an ambling preambling palfrey, than on any
determinate charger; curveting and prancing, and rambling and
scrambling at his own unmanaged will: scorning the bit and bridle, too
hot to bear the spur, careless of listing laws, and wishing rather
playfully to show his paces, than to tilt against a foe.
An author's mind, quà author, is essentially a gossip; an oral, ocular,
imaginative, common-place book: a pot pourri mixed from the hortus
siccus of education, and the greener garden of internal thought that
springs in fresh verdure about the heart's own fountain; a compound of
many metals flowing from the mental crucible as one--perchance a base
alloy, perchance new, and precious, and beautiful as the fine brass of
Corinth; an accidental meeting in the same small chamber of many
spiritual essences that combine, as by magnetism into some strange and
novel substance; a mixture of appropriations, made lawfully a man's
own by labour spent upon the raw material; corn-clad Egypt rescued

from a burnt Africa by the richness of a swelling Nile--the black forest
of pines changed into a laughing vineyard by skill, enterprise, and
culture--the mechanism of Frankenstein's man of clay, energized at
length by the spark Promethean.
And now, reader, do you begin to comprehend me, and my title? 'An
Author's Mind' is first in the field, and, as with root and fruit, must take
precedence of its booklets; bear then, if you will, with this desultory
anatomization of itself yet a little longer, and then in good time and
moderate space you will come to the rudiments--bones, so to speak--of
its many members, the frame-work on which its nerves and muscles
hang, the names of its unborn children, the title-pages of its own
unprinted books.
Philosophers and fools, separately or together, as the case may be--for
folly and philosophy not seldom form one Janus-head, and Minerva's
bird seems sometimes not