University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

Some of these papers were published in the Southern
Literary Messenger, and having met with a favorable
reception from the Public, and a portion of the
Press, the author has yielded to the solicitations of
his own vanity, and other flattering friends, and collected
them in a volume with other pieces of the same
general character. The scheme of the articles he
believes to be original in design and execution,—at
least, no other work with which he is acquainted, has
been published in the United States designed to illustrate
the periods, the characters, and the phases of
society, some notion of which is attempted to be given
in this volume. The author, under the tremor of a

first publication, felt strongly inclined to offer a
sneaking apology for the many errors and imperfections
of his work; such as the fact that the articles
were written in haste, under the pressure of professional
engagements and amidst constant interruptions;
and that he has no time or opportunity for correction
and revision. But he anticipated the too ready answer
to such a plea: “If you had no time to write
well, why did you write at all? Who constrained you?
If you were not in dress to see company, why come
unbidden into the presence of the public? Why not,
at least, wait until you were fit to be presented?”
He confesses that he sees no way to answer these
tough questions, unless the apology of Falstaff for
rushing into the presence of King Hal, “before he
had time to have made new liveries”—“stained with
travel and sweating with desire to see him,”—be a
good one—as, “inferring the zeal he had to see him”
—“the earnestness of affection”—“the devotion:”
but in poor Jack's case, “not to deliberate, not to remember,
not to have patience to shift him,” was not
a very effectual excuse for his coming out of sorts;
and we are afraid, that that other Sovereign, the
Public, is not more facile of approach, or more credulous
of excuses; for, unfortunately, the ardor of an
author's greeting is something beyond the heat of the
Public's reception of him, or, as Pat expresses it, the
reciprocity of feeling is all on one side.

Without apology, therefore, he gives these leaves
to the winds,—with that feeling of comfort and composure
which comes of the knowledge that, let the
venture go as it may, he loses little who puts but little
at hazard.

The author begs to return to the accomplished
Editor of the Messenger, Jno. R. Thompson, Esq., his
acknowledgments, for revising and correcting this
work as it passed through the press.

Livingston, Ala., 1853.