So give the colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that this same colt, as straying without a responsible rider, is indeed liable to be impounded by any who can catch him; but still, if he be found to have done great damage to his master's character, or to a neighbour's fences, the estray shall rather be abandoned than acknowledged.

Let then this unequal work, this ill-assorted bundle of dry book-plants, this undirected parcel of literary stuff, be accounted much in the same situation as that of the wanton caitiff-colt, so likely to bait a-pound, and afterwards to be sold for payment of expenses, in true bailiff-sense of justice.

And let thus much serve as discursive prolegomena to a notion, scarcely worth recording, but for the wonder, that no professed writer (at least to my small knowledge) has entered on so common-sense a field.

Paris, I remember, some years ago was inundated with copies of a treatise on the important art of tying the cravat; every shop-window displayed the mystic diagrams, and every stiff neck proclaimed its popularity.

This was my yesterday's-conceived precedent for entertaining the bright hope of illuminating London on the subject of shaving: ANTI-XURION; A CRUSADE AGAINST RAZORS, should have been my taking title; and perchance the learned treatise might have been characteristically illustrated with steel cuts.