INTRODUCTION.

Having lately been travelling in Germany, I spent some time at that
University in which Augustus Tomlinson presided as Professor of Moral
Philosophy. I found that that great man died, after a lingering illness,
in the beginning of the year 1822, perfectly resigned to his fate, and
conversing, even on his deathbed, on the divine mysteries of Ethical
Philosophy. Notwithstanding the little peccadilloes to which I have
alluded in the latter pages of "Paul Clifford," and which his pupils
deemed it advisable to hide from--

"The gaudy, babbling, and remorseless day,"

his memory was still held in a tender veneration. Perhaps, as in the
case of the illustrious Burns, the faults of a great man endear to you
his genius. In his latter days the PROFESSOR was accustomed to wear a
light-green silk dressing-gown, and, as he was perfectly bald, a little
black velvet cap; his small-clothes were pepper and salt. These
interesting facts I learned from one of his pupils. His old age was
consumed in lectures, in conversation, and in the composition of the
little _morceaux_ of wisdom we present to the public. In these essays
and maxims, short as they are, he seems to have concentrated the wisdom
of his industrious and honourable life. With great difficulty I procured
from his executors the manuscripts which were then preparing for the
German press. A valuable consideration induced those gentlemen to become
philanthropic, and to consider the inestimable blessings they would
confer upon this country by suffering me to give the following essays to
the light, in their native and English dress, on the same day whereon
they appear in Germany in the graces of foreign disguise.