than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear question;
nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras, whose Memoirs
have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall I emulate the
grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich and
Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upon
dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall be
my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of the raconteur and to
restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But neither fear of the charge of
self-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too obtrusive to be
real shall deter me from a proper freedom of narration, where, though in
the main but a humble chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene and
speak of myself; for I at least have not always been a dummy and have
sometimes in a way helped to make history.

In my early life--as it were, my salad days--I aspired to becoming what
old Simon Cameron called "one of those damned literary fellows" and Thomas
Carlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity." But some
malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy to
become The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier The National
Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep joke; but the
phantom of the laurel crown would never linger upon my fair young brow.

Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper's Weekly--happily no
one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had the
prudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to publish
a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the great
American novel." It was actually accepted by my ever too partial friend,
Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and his
successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that performance, a
view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres values subsequently came