this polite and learned age, when they would correct the ill nature
of critical or inform the ignorance of courteous readers. Besides,
there have been several famous pieces lately published, both in
verse and prose, wherein if the writers had not been pleased, out of
their great humanity and affection to the public, to give us a nice
detail of the sublime and the admirable they contain, it is a
thousand to one whether we should ever have discovered one grain of
either. For my own particular, I cannot deny that whatever I have
said upon this occasion had been more proper in a preface, and more
agreeable to the mode which usually directs it there. But I here
think fit to lay hold on that great and honourable privilege of
being the last writer. I claim an absolute authority in right as
the freshest modern, which gives me a despotic power over all
authors before me. In the strength of which title I do utterly
disapprove and declare against that pernicious custom of making the
preface a bill of fare to the book. For I have always looked upon
it as a high point of indiscretion in monstermongers and other
retailers of strange sights to hang out a fair large picture over
the door, drawn after the life, with a most eloquent description
underneath. This has saved me many a threepence, for my curiosity
was fully satisfied, and I never offered to go in, though often
invited by the urging and attending orator with his last moving and
standing piece of rhetoric, "Sir, upon my word, we are just going to
begin." Such is exactly the fate at this time of Prefaces,
Epistles, Advertisements, Introductions, Prolegomenas, Apparatuses,
To the Readers's. This expedient was admirable at first; our great
Dryden has long carried it as far as it would go, and with
incredible success. He has often said to me in confidence that the
world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet if he had
not assured them so frequently in his prefaces, that it was