PREFACE.

"If you love your readers, and wish to be read, get anecdotes," is the sagacious advice to authors, in a contemporary critical journal ;* and a kindred sense of the interest as well as the value of this species of reading has encouraged the production of the present volumes. Their immediate object is to collect and arrange, in the most entertaining as well as serviceable form, the salient points in the Lives of some of the leading Wits and Humorists who had adorned our literature. The advantages of such a plan have been thus enforced by one of the greatest masters, in saying that, "Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, &c., have the same use with burning-glasses, to collect the diffused rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination."t

The economy of the plan need not be insisted upon; if we are to trust the adage—that "the wit of one is the wisdom of many."

:

Each of the Anecdote Lives is divided into two sections first, the leading points are arranged in chronological and biographical sequence; and next, the Characteristics, Retrospective Opinions, and Personal Traits, which include such matters as do not belong to any specified period, and cannot be so classed as to follow the example of time.

Hitherto, Anecdotes have been for the most part narrated as detached incidents in the lives of their subjects; but in these volumes an attempt is made to connect such incidents

* Quarterly Review: Art. "Table-Talk."

+ Swift.