Reader walk up at once (it will soon be too late), and buy at a perfectly ruinous rate

A FABLE FOR CRITICS:

OR, BETTER,

(I LIKE, AS A THING THAT THE READER'S FIRST FANCY MAY STRIKE, AN OLD-FASHIONED TITLEPAGE, SUCH AS PRESENTS A TABULAR VIEW OF THE VOLUME'S CONTENTS),

A GLANCE AT A FEW OF OUR LITERARY PROGENIES

(MRS. MALAPROP'S WORD) FROM THE TUB OF DIOGENES;

A VOCAL AND MUSICAL MEDLEY,

THAT IS,

A SERIES OF JOKES

Bp A Wonderful Quiz,

WHO ACCOMPANIES HIMSELF WITH A RUB-ADUB-DUB, FULL OF SPIRIT AND GRACE, ON THE TOP OF THE TUB.

Set forth in October, the 31st day, In the year '48, G. P. Putnam, Broadway.

This jeu d'esprit was extemporized, I may fairly say, so rapidly was it written, purely for my own amusement and with no thought of publication. I sent daily instalments of it to a friend in New York, the late Charles F. Briggs. He urged me to let it be printed, and I at last consented to its anonymous publication. The secret was kept till after several persons had laid claim to its authorship. (LOWELL.)

On the writing of the Fable,' its progress from week to week, and Lowell's presentation of the copyright to his friend Briggs, see Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, pp. 238-255.

Holmes said of it: It is capital - crammed full and rammed down hard-powder (lots of it) shot slugs -bullets very little wadding, and that is gun-cotton -all crowded into a rusty looking sort of a blunderbuss barrel as it were capped with a percussion preface and cocked with a title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.' (Morse's Life of Holmes, vol. ii, p. 107.)

The original title-page is given above.

It being the commonest mode of proce dure, I premise a few candid remarks TO THE READER:

This trifle, begun to please only myself and my own private fancy, was laid on the shelf. But some friends, who had seen it, induced me, by dint of saying they liked it, to put it in print. That is, having come to that very conclusion, I asked their advice when 't would make no confusion. For though (in the gentlest of ways) they had hinted it was scarce worth the while, I should doubtless have printed it.

I began it, intending a Fable, a frail, slender thing, rhyme-ywinged, with a sting in its tail. But, by addings and alterings not previously planned, digressions chancehatched, like birds' eggs in the sand, and dawdlings to suit every whimsey's demand (always freeing the bird which I held in my hand, for the two perched, perhaps out of reach, in the tree), - it grew by degrees to the size which you see. I was like the old woman that carried the calf, and my neighbors, like hers, no doubt, wonder and laugh; and when, my strained arms with their grown burthen full, I call it my Fable, they call it a bull.

Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a style that is neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a person whom nobody knows, some people will say I am rather more free with my readers than it is becoming to be, that I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in following wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in short, I take more than a young author's lawful ease, and laugh in a queer way so like Mephistopheles, that the Public will doubt, as they grope through my rhythm, if in truth I am making fun of

them or with them.

So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of my book is already secured. For there is not a poet throughout the whole land but will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation of being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut up and abused in it. Now, I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are some

thing like ten thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review and Magazine critics call lofty and true, and about thirty thousand (this tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed full of promise and pleasing. The Public will see by a glance at this schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about courting them, since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of for boiling my pot.

As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned once in my pages, with praises or blames, let them SEND IN THEIR CARDS, without further DELAY, to my friend G. P. PUTNAM, Esquire, in Broadway, where a LIST will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour of receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time (that is, if their names can be twisted in rhyme), I will honestly give each his PROPER POSITION, at the rate of ONE AUTHOR to each NEW EDITION. Thus a PREMIUM is offered sufficiently HIGH (as the magazines say when they tell their best lie) to induce bards to CLUB their resources and buy the balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly been run through the mill.

One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read books with something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the country, perhaps, there are two, including myself, gentle reader, and you. All the characters sketched in this slight jeu d'esprit, though, it may be, they seem, here and there, rather free, and drawn from a somewhat too cynical standpoint, are meant to be faithful, for that is the grand point, and none but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells you, without any subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes' tub.

PHOEBUS, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade,

Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was

made,

He somehow or other had never forgiven her;

Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic, Something bitter to chew when he'd play the Byronic,

10

And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over

By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.

My case is like Dido's,' he sometimes remarked;

"When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked

In a laurel, as she thought — but (ah, how Fate mocks!)

She has found it by this time a very bad box; Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,

You 're not always sure of your game when you've treed it.

Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress!

who can

20

What romance would be left ?flatter or kiss trees? And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue

With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,

Not to say that the thought would forever intrude

That you've less chance to win her the

more she is wood?

Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,

To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;

Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting

but now,

Apollo looked up, hearing footsteps approaching,

And slipped out of sight the new rhymes he was broaching,

'Good day, Mr. D—‚1 I 'm happy to meet

1 Duyckinck. Evert A. Duyckinck, with his brother George L. Duyckinck, published a Cyclopædia of American Literature, embracing personal and critical notices of authors, and selections from their writings.'

in all.

vice is,

...

1 Compare three passages in Lowell's Letters (quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers): The Bryant is funny, and as fair as I could make it, immitigably just. Indeed I have endeavored to be so The only verses I shall add regarding him are some complimentary ones which I left for a happier mood after I had written the comic part.', May 12, 1848. See the whole passage, Lowell's Letters, vol. i, p. 131. I am quite sensible that I did not do Mr. Bryant justice in the "Fable." But there was no personal feeling in what I said- though I have regretted what I did say because it might seem personal. I am now asked to write a review of his poems for the North American. If I do, I shall try to do him justice.' January 11, 1855; vol. i, p. 221.

I am all the gladder I wrote my poem for Bryant's birthday ["On Board the Seventy-Six,"]—a kind of palinode to what I said of him in the "Fable for Critics," which has something of youth's infallibility in it, or at any rate of youth's irresponsibility.' February 9. 1887. See the whole letter (to Mr. Richard Watson Gilder), Lowell's Letters, vol. ii, p. 334.