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ADVERTISEMENT.

MORE than twenty-five years have passed since these Essays were written. It is perhaps twenty years since I have perused them. My bookseller has invited me to the task; and I owe it to the public not again to, commit them to the press without some revision. But I have little leisure for the business. My mind is at this moment wholly engrossed in a work, which, if my life and my faculties are sufficiently prolonged, and the precariousness of my outward circumstances will admit it, I should gladly finish, and make it perhaps my last legacy to my fellow men.

In reading over these Essays, I find scarcely a thought that is my present

thought, or which, at least, if I were now called upon to write upon their subjects for the first time, I should not express somewhat differently from the way in which it is here expressed. Our minds change like our bodies by insensible degrees, till they cannot, but with some looseness of phraseology, be called the same. Twenty-five years ago I was in the full vigour of animal life; I am so no longer, but in a green old age. When I wrote these Essays, I was a bachelor; I have since become a husband and a father, Yet the difference between the thoughts here expressed, and the thoughts I now entertain, is not fundamental; and to a careless observer would in most instances be imperceptible. Nor do I wish to change the texture of the publication. To those who feel any interest in my writings, such a change would scarcely be acceptable. In the volume to which these lines are prefixed, I appear such as I then was, and in a dress correspondent to the period of life I had reached. In what I may

yet publish, there may perhaps be found something of the garrulity of age, and I hope also something of grey-headed reflection, and a more mature and well-ripened cast of thought.

But, alas! to what does it all amount? The toys of childhood, the toys of manhood, and the toys of old age, are still toys. And, if it were hereafter possible for me to look down upon them from a future state, I should find them to be all alike laborious trifles. As it is, and seeing with my present imperfect organs, I am more than half inclined to despise them. But I know not that I could have done any better.

The alterations which I have introduced into the present edition are not considerable. They are greatest in the concluding Essay, as my opinions in some respects on the subject of that Essay have sustained a material change; and I was not willing to contribute, however slightly, to

give permanence to notions which now appeared to me erroneous.

I have added two pages to the end of the Essay on Beggars. And, if it may be allowed, I would particularly solicit the reader's attention to a note now added, in page 256, on the character of Brutus.

¡July 16, 1823.

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