PREFACE TO THIS EDITION. T HIS is the third edition of the First Series, and the second of the Second, and having said this, what more can I say but that I am surprised and grateful; that I find nobody likes my title, and that I agree with everybody who doesn't; that I wish I had called it anything else-Odds and Ends, Papers, Diversions, Miscellanies, Nuga, or any of those many nicknames which parental fondness and conceit devises for its offspring "in luxury of disrespect," rather than these semi-pedantic Hora Subseciva;1 that this wish 1 It is curious the number of books having this title, from the dull and wholesome volume "printed for Edward is useless now, and that, like Mutton-hole or Mr. Muggeridge, I must submit to my name and its penalties; that the "Excursus Ethicus" is moved into volume second; and that the paper on "Education through the Senses" is new, and perhaps too high-pitched, and would have been none the worse of a specific disclaimer of any wish to disparage the teaching of the classics, which I hope I shall always look upon as at once a discipline and a philosophy, a knowledge and an instrument of search, and one of the best joys of old age, and for whose want in humane culture nothing can make Blount, and to be sold at his shope in Paul's Churchyard, at the signe of the Black Beare, 1620," down to the small volume of our subtle Dr. Fletcher, published five-and-twenty years ago. Perhaps some industrious and knowing contributor to the admirable Notes and Queries, may be able to tell us how many Hora Subsecivæ our language contains. I have a copy of those printed for Mr. Blount, on the title-page of which is written in a contemporary hand by ye Lord Candish, after Earle of Devonshire," and in another corrective hand of the same age, " by Gilbert Lord Candish, eldest son of Wm. 1st Earl of Devonshire, but ye Ld. Candish died in ye lifetime of his father.” amends; finally, that I hoped to have given my readers and myself the pleasure of the sequel to "St. Paul's Thorn in the Flesh; What was it?" had not my dear and tiresome cousin refused to give it me, because it did not please himself, as if anything he ever did or would do, ever would or did please that personage. I did not ask him to please himself, but to please us, which I assure you he certainly would have done. If the rest of the world has now-a-days too little of the labor lima, he has too much. When I was last prefacing, it was the time when "winking mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes," ""and winter, slumbering in the open air, wore on his smiling face a dream of spring;" now, the rouk (mist born of early frosts) is lying white and chill, like the breath of awakening winter, sweet Teviot, along thy no longer wild but still willowy shore, for the summer is over and gone; and if not bin" is everything, much "that pretty bin with it. No! not everything, for "The mist is full of voices musical The laugh of merry children—the shrill call Where following sheep trot bleating, and the cry October 10, 1861. J. B. PREFACE. IN that delightful and provoking book, "THE DOCTOR, etc.," Southey says: "Prefaces,' said Charles Blount, Gent., 'Prefaces,' according to this flippant, illopinioned, and unhappy man, 'ever were, and still are, but of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please,-let the long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again,-yet still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting himself to his readers' mercy whether he shall be hanged or no, or else, in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This, with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant and |