TO THE KING'S MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY, SIRE, Permit us to lay at your feet the first fruits of the combined exertions of a few of your Majesty's subjects, educated within the GROSSLY misrepresented UNIVERSITY of LONDON. We have the honour to be, SIRE, With profound veneration, Your Majesty's faithful servants, THE PROPRIETORS. PREFACE TO THE FIRST VOLUME. "Another, and another, and another." To invent an apology for adding another to the many voices which, in our literary Babel, are at present occupied in instructing or distracting the public mind, we have consulted neither partial friends, the public, nor our publisher. We were induced to the establishment of the Work, by a hope of being able to render it interesting to the world, as being in some degree a record of the public proceedings of that Institution from which we take our name-to our fellow-students, however, more particularly, as affording a mirror wherein mind might be compared with mind, among those who are striving in the same career of literary acquirement—an arena where conflicting opinions on subjects philosophical, literary, and scientific, may meet in bloodless contest. It was naturally our wish that a large portion of our pages should be occupied by the productions of students of the University; but that the Work should be generally interesting and instructive, we have regarded an object infinitely more worthy our aim than the rendering it peculiarly collegiate. A long preface is impertinent; and as our present Volume will speak for itself, we will only add, in the words of the usual formula, that our undiminished exertions shall be given to render our Work worthy a continuance of that support, with which we have been honoured; and, if we may profess such an object without presumption, an ornament to the Institution under whose shade it has arisen. To those who read for amusement, as well as to those who read for instruction, we are the servants and the caterers; to the mere critic who reads for neither, we acknowledge no allegiance-to him we say at once, that we profess not to submit to the scrutiny of his "brow severe" a work which will bear the testy application of the "Rhetorician's Rules;" for with the conscious perfection of experienced writers, and the stage-trick of authorship, we are equally unacquainted. Liable, therefore, as we must be, to many errors, but venturing to express a hope that in the present case severity of censure will be suppressed, whilst those who regard us as worthy of their good report will not be backward in giving it, we would equally say to the captious and the kind, in the ambiguous phrase of the monarch of the Roman lyre, "FAVETE LINGUIS." Dec. 29, 1829. |