equally in your power as in mine, but that you may never have occasion to feel equally grateful for it, as I have, and do in body and estate, is the fervent wish of

Your affectionate

S. T. COLERidge.

FROM BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH

MAGAZINE, JAN. 1822.
Sundry
Select Chapters

From the Book of the

Two Worlds,

Translated from the Ori-
ginal ESOTERIC into the
Language of the

LOCLAST

Border Land:

Comprizing the Historie and Gests
of MAXILIAN, agnominated
COSMENCEPHALUS and a Cousin
Serman of SATYRANE, the IDO-
a very true Novel
founded on Acts, aptly divided
and diversely digested into Fyttes,
Flights, Stations (or Landing-places)
Floors and Stories complete
Numeris, more or less.

in

NOTA BENE. By default of the decypherer, we are forced to leave the blank space before "Nume

ris" unfilled; a part of the work, we fear, still remaining in the Gncephalic character, a sort of SANS-SCRIPT, much used, we understand, by adepts in the occult sciences, as likewise for promissory notes. We should also apologize for the indiscretion of our author in his epistolary preface (seduced by the wish of killing two birds with one stone,) in shutting up vis a vis, as it were, so respectable and comprehensive (not to say synodical,) a personage as THE READER with Dick Proof, corrector of what press, we know not, unless, as we grievously suspect, he is in the employ of Messrs. Dash, Asterisk, Anon, and Company. Nor is this all; this impropriety being aggravated by sundry passages, exclusively relating and addressed to this Mr. Proof, which have an effect on the series of thoughts common to both the parties, not much unlike that, which a parenthesis or two of links, made of dandelion stems, might be supposed to produce in my Lord Mayor or Mr. Sheriff's gold chain. In one flagrant instance, with which the first paragraph in the MSS. concluded, we have, by virtue of our editorial prerogative, degraded the passage to the place and condition of a Note.-EDITOR.

Μοττο.*

"How wishedly will some pity the case of ARGALUS and PARTHENIA, the patience of GRY SELD in Chaucer, the misery

* Which Posterity is requested to reprint at the back of

and troublesome adventures of the phanatic (phrenetic?) lovers in Cleopatra, Cassandra, Amadis de Gaul, Sidney, and such like! Yet all these are as mere romantic as Ra

belais his Garagantua. And yet with an unmoved apprehension, can peruse the very dolorous and lamentable murder of MILCOLUMB the First, the cutting off the head of good KING ALPINUS, the poisoning of FERGUSIUS the Third by his own queen, and the throat-cutting of KING FETHELMACHUS by a fiddler! nay, and moreover, even the martyrdom of old QUEEN KETABAN in Persia, the stabbing of Henry Fourth in France, the sacrilegious poisoning of Emperor Henry Seventh in Italy, the miserable death of MAURICIUS the Emperor, with a wife and five children, by wicked PHOCAS,—can read, I say, these and the like fatal passages, recorded by holy fathers and grave chroniclers, with less pity and compassion than the shallow loves of Romeo for his Juliet in Shakespeare-his deplorable tragedies, or shun the pitiful wanderings of Lady Una in search of her stray Red-cross, in Master Spenser his quaint rhymes. Yea, the famous doings, and grievous sufferings of our own anointed kings, may be far outrivalled in some men's minds by the hardships of some enchanted innamorato in Ariosto, Parisinus, or the two Palmerins."

FOULIS's History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies, &c.

MOTTO II.

Pray, why is it that people say that men are not such fools now-a-days as they were in the days of yore? I would fain know, whether you would have us understand by this same saying, as indeed you logically may, that formerly men were fools, and in this generation are grown wise. How many and what dispositions made them fools? How many, and what dispositions were wanting to make 'em wise?

the title page, for the present, Quo' North, quo' Blackwood quo' concessére Columna.

Why were those fools? How should these be wise? Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly fools? How did you find that they are now wise? Who made them fools? Who in Heaven's name made them wise? Who d'ye think are most, those that loved mankind foolish, or those that love it wise? How long has it been wise? How long otherwise? Whence proceeded the foregoing folly? Whence the following wisdom? Why did the old folly end now and no later? Why did the modern wisdom begin now and no sooner? What were we the worse for the former folly? What the better for the succeeding wisdom? How should the ancient folly have come to nothing? How should this same new wisdom be started up and established? Now answer me, an't please you."

FRANCIS RABELAIS' Preface to his Fifth Book.

EPISTLE PREMONITORY FOR THE READER; but contra-monitory and in reply to

DICK PROOF, Corrector.

F the sundry sorts of vice, Richard, that ob

tain in this sinful world, one of the most troublesome is advice, and no less an annoyance to my feelings, than a pun is to thine.

Lay your scene further off!!" Was ever historian before affronted by so wild a suggestion? If, indeed, the moods, measures, and events of the last six years, insular and continental, or the like of that, had been the title and subject matter of the work; and you had then advised the transfer of the scene to Siam and Borneo, or to Abyssinia and the Isle of Ormusthere would be something to say for it, verisimili

tudinis causá, or on the ground of lessening the improbability of the narrative. But in the history of Maxilian !-Why, the locality, man, is an essential part of the a priori evidence of its truth! * *

In a biographical work, † the proprieties of place are indispensable, Dick. To prove this, you need only change the scene in the History of Rob Roy from the precipices of Ben Lomond, and the glens and inlets of the Trossacs (the Trossacs worthy to have made a W. S. but that a W. S. is only of God's making, "nascitur non fit,") to Snow-hill, Breckneck Stairs, or Little Hell in Westminsterby going to which last named place, Dick, when we were at the school, you evaded the guilt of forswearing for telling of me to our master, after you had sworn that you would go -, if you did, —well knowing where you meant me to understand you, and where in honour you ought to have gone -but this may be mended in time.

And lay the time further back! But why, Richard? I pray thee tell me, why? The present, you reply, is not the age of the supernatural.

In biography, which, by the bi-, reminds me of a rejoinder made to me, nigh 30 years ago, by Parsons the Bookseller, on my objecting to sundry anecdotes in a MS. Life, that did more credit to the wit and invention of the author, than to his honesty and veracity. "In a professed biography, Mr. P." quoth I, pleadingly, and somewhat syllabically." Biography, sir," interrupted he, "Sellography is what I want."