Volume 12

IN the golden age of English theology, when the writers’ minds as well as their books were grand massive folios, a preface was generally worthy of careful reading. It was crowded with pithy sentences nestling together like young doves, and it abounded with sportive metaphors, skipping upon the page like lambs in a field.

The authors of the Puritan ages were noble entertainers of their reader, they served up no light breakfast of French rolls and butter, but they set before their guests right royal banquets of substantial and luxurious fare. They brought forth feasts of fat things, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined, and their prefaces were fit heralds of such princely hospitalities, gorgeously liveried with wit and learning, as became the servants of mental royalty, throwing open the doors of the banqueting hall with a stately grace, and with a hearty blast of trumpets such as beseemed the richness of the table.

Our degenerate age retains the name and state of a preface, but like the Lord Mayor’s show, it is so shorn of its glory, that common humanity proposes its omission. More or less reluctantly the majority of our authors obey the ancient custom, for such is the conservatism of our English nature that as we will not endure the removal of a city gate when the town has swollen many miles beyond it, so, on the other hand, we maintain the ostentation of a moat and drawbridge when the castle has dwindled into a cottage.