Men of character

Front matter

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Preface

sacrifices to a better time, informed with a more humanising spirit. Thus; as says Orion —

" The circle -widens as the world spins round."

The incidents of Jack's sailor life — with the characters that beset it — are little, very little coloured. And now most of them belong to the past. Englishmen are no more likely again to experience the horrors of the Tower Tender, than the doings of the Argonauts.

Adam Buff may haply have descendants : men with a sort of topsy-turvy prosperity, that, by the turn of accident, transforms the naked necessities of their condition, into their self-denying and rewarded virtues.

A Matthew Clear may continue to see. his way; though — so have we proceeded in the work of pulling down and casting aside — there is no longer a pillory, in which the culprit is framed for an example to the lookers-on ; the admonished beholders taking supplementary law into their own hands, as gathered from the gutter and the dust-bin.

John Applejohjst, at the present time, would hardly need to sit upon the stone step of a stony sponging-house, awaiting the advent of a messenger sent " to search the books." It might, too, be most difficult — even impossible — for John, in 1851, to fall into the hilarious company of lords and gentlemen bound together to break the peace : yet, when John was in his literary growth, such nobles and gentry were in the flesh, and — in the newspapers. Finally — for it needs not to run through the file — Barnaby Palms is confessed to be a sad, mean rascal. But let him not be thought a mere knavery of fiction : an unreal villain curdled from the sourness of invention.

In the treatment of some of the subjects of this volume there

PREFACE.

may be found occasional roughness of thought ; but the writer would fain hope not altogether unaccompanied by something better carried along with it.

Happy the writer if in his conduct of these pages he may liken himself to nothing higher than Plutarch's hedgehog. What says the grand old writer in his enquiry, " Which are the most crafty, water animals, or those that breed in the sea ? " He says — and for the prettiness of the matter it is much that it is said upon his own testimony —

" The provision which the hedgehogs make for their young ones is much more ingenious. For when autumn comes, they creep under the vines, and shake off the grapes with their feet ; which done, they roll themselves up and down, and take them up into their prickles, so that when they creep away again, you would think it a walking cluster (and this we have looked on, and seen them do) ! after which, returning to their holes, they lay themselves down for their young ones to feed upon."

Thus, if the book have its prickles, I trust it may also have some little fruit ; if there be found hedgehogs in the pages, I hope it will be seen that here and there the hedgehogs are not without a grape.

D.J.

West Lodge, Putney Lower Common November 18, 1851.