It has won on each side both praise from the good and censure from the bad: our comic papers have amused us with its travesties--as Church Liturgies and Holy Writ have been similarly parodied,--and some of the modern writers who are unfriendly to Christian influences have done their small endeavour to damage both the book and its author through adverse criticism.

But their efforts are vain.

They have availed only to advance--from first to last now for some forty-five years--the world-wide success of "Proverbial Philosophy." If it is expected, as a matter of impartiality, that I should here print adverse criticisms as well as those which are favourable, I simply decline to be so foolish: a caricature impresses where a portrait is forgotten: the _litera scripta_ in printer's ink remains and is quotable for ever, and I do not think it worth while deliberately to traduce myself and my book children by adopting the opinions of dyspeptic scribes who will find how well I think of them in my Proverbial Essay "Zoilism;" which, by the way, I read at St.Andrews, before some chiefs of that university, with A.K.H.B.

in the chair.
* * * * * Accordingly, I prefer now to appear one-sided, as a piece of common sense; quite indifferent to the charge of vain-gloriousness; all the good verdicts quoted are genuine, absolutely unpaid and unrewarded, and are matters of sincere and skilled opinion; so being such I prize them: the opposing judgments--much fewer, and far less hearty, as "willing to wound and yet afraid to strike"-- may as well perish out of memory by being ignored and neglected.

Here is a social anecdote to illustrate what I mean.