An Author's Mind : The Book of Title-pages

Published in 1841 this book contains skeletons of thirty unpublished books. In these days of universal knowledge, schoolmaster and scholars all abroad together, quotation is voted pedantry, and to interpret is accounted an impertinence; yet will I boldly proclaim, as a mere fact, clear to the perceptions of all it may concern",This book deserves richly of the Sosii. " And that for the best of reasons: it is not only a book, but a book full of books; not merely a new book, but a little-library of new books; thirty books in one, a very harvest of epitomized authorship, the cream of a whole fairy dairy of quiescent post-octavos. It is not-O, mark ye this, my Sosii, (and by the way, gentle ladies, these were worshipful booksellers of old, the Murrays and the Bentleys of imperial Rome, )-it is not the dull concreted elongation of one isolated hackneyed idea-supposing in every work there be one, a charitable hypothesis-wire-drawn, and coaxed, and hammered through three regulation volumes; but the scarcely-more-than-hinted abstractions of some forty thousand flitting notions-hasty, yet meditative Hamlets; none of those lengthy, drawling emblems of Laertes-driven in flocks to the net of the fowler, and penned with difficult compression within these modest limits. So "goe forth, littel boke", and make thyself a friend among those good husbandmen, who tend the trees of knowledge, and bring their fruit to the world's market.