Daisy's Necklace And What Came of It

TO THE UNFORTUNATE READER. In this little Extravaganza, I have done just what I intended. I have attempted to describe, in an auto-biographical sort of way, a well-meaning, but somewhat vain young gentleman, who, having flirted desperately with the Magazines, takes it into his silly head to write a novel, all the chapters of which are laid before the reader, with some running criticism by T.

James Barescythe, Esquire, the book-noticer of "The Morning Glory," ("a journal devoted to the Fine Arts and the Amelioration of all Mankind,") and the type of a certain class which need not be distinctly specified for recognition. I have endeavored to make the novel of my literary hero such a one as a young man with fine taste and crude talent might produce; and I think I have succeeded. It is certainly sufficiently unfinished. In drawing the character of Barescythe, the point of my quill may have pierced a friend; and if you ask, like Ludovico, "What shall be said of thee?" I shall answer, like Othello, "Why, anything: An honorable murderer, if you will; For nought I did in hate, but all in honor." The only audacious thing I have done is the writing of this preface. If there is anything more stupid than a "preface," it is a book-critic. If anything could be more stupid than a book-critic, it would be a preface. But, thank heaven, there is not. In saying this, I refer to a particular critic; for I would not, for the sake of a tenth edition, malign in such a wholesale manner those capital good fellows of the press--those verbal accoucheurs who are so pleasantly officious at the birth of each new genius. Not I. I have