Rejected Addresses | Page 6

receiving an application to write a Preface to a new
and more handsome impression. In diminution, however, of any

overweening vanity which they might be disposed to indulge on this
occasion, they cannot but admit the truth of the remark made by a
particularly candid and good-natured friend, who kindly reminded them,
that if their little work has hitherto floated upon the stream of time,
while so many others of much greater weight and value have sunk to
rise no more, it has been solely indebted for its buoyancy to that
specific levity which enables feathers, straws, and similar trifles to
defer their submersion until they have become thoroughly saturated
with the waters of oblivion, when they quickly meet the fate which they
had long before merited.
Our ingenuous and ingenious friend furthermore observed, that the
demolition of Drury Lane Theatre by fire, its reconstruction under the
auspices of the celebrated Mr. Whitbread, {2} the reward offered by
the Committee for an opening address, and the public recitation of a
poem composed expressly for the occasion by Lord Byron, one of the
most popular writers of the age, formed an extraordinary concurrence
of circumstances which could not fail to insure the success of the
Rejected Addresses, while it has subsequently served to fix them in the
memory of the public, so far at least as a poor immortality of twenty
years can be said to have effected that object. In fact, continued our
impartial and affectionate monitor, your little work owes its present
obscure existence entirely to the accidents that have surrounded and
embalmed it,--even as flies, and other worthless insects, may long
survive their natural date of extinction, if they chance to be preserved in
amber, or any similar substance.
The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare - But wonder how the
devil they got there!--POPE.
With the natural affection of parents for the offspring of their own
brains, we ventured to hint that some portion of our success might
perhaps be attributable to the manner in which the different imitations
were executed; but our worthy friend protested that his sincere regard
for us, as well as for the cause of truth, compelled him to reject our
claim, and to pronounce that, when once the idea had been conceived,
all the rest followed as a matter of course, and might have been
executed by any other hands not less felicitously than by our own.
Willingly leaving this matter to the decision of the public, since we
cannot be umpires in our own cause, we proceed to detail such

circumstances attending the writing and publication of our little work,
as may literally meet the wishes of the present proprietor of the
copyright, who has applied to us for a gossiping Preface. Were we
disposed to be grave and didactic, which is as foreign to our mood as it
was twenty years ago, we might draw the attention of the reader, in a
fine sententious paragraph, to the trifles upon which the fate of empires,
as well as a four-and-sixpenny volume of parodies, occasionally hangs
in trembling balance. No sooner was the idea of our work conceived,
than it was about to be abandoned in embryo, from the apprehension
that we had no lime to mature and bring it forth, as it was indispensable
that it should be written, printed, and published by the opening of
Drury Lane Theatre, which would only allow us an interval of six
weeks, and we had both of us other avocations that precluded us from
the full command of even that limited period. Encouraged, however, by
the conviction that the thought was a good one, and by the hope of
making a lucky hit, we set to work con amore, our very hurry not
improbably enabling us to strike out at a heat what we might have
failed to produce so well, had we possessed time enough to hammer it
into more careful and elaborate form.
Our first difficulty, that of selection, was by no means a light one.
Some of our most eminent poets--such, for instance, as Rogers and
Campbell--presented so much beauty, harmony, and proportion in their
writings, both as to style and sentiment, that if we had attempted to
caricature them, nobody would have recognised the likeness; and if we
had endeavoured to give a servile copy of their manner, it would only
have amounted, at best, to a tame and unamusing portrait, which it was
not our object to present. Although fully aware that their names would,
in the theatrical phrase, have conferred great strength upon our bill, we
were reluctantly compelled to forego them, and to confine ourselves to
writers whose style and habit of thought, being more marked and
peculiar, was more capable of exaggeration and distortion. To avoid