Produced by Robert Nield, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Complete with exceptions specified in the preface
What work nobler than transplanting foreign thought into the barrendomestic soil? except indeed planting thought of your own, which thefewest are privileged to do.—Sartor Resartus.
At each flaw, be this your first thought: the author doubtless saidsomething quite different, and much more to the point. And then you mayhiss me off, if you will.—LUCIAN, Nigrinus, 9.
(LUCIAN) The last great master of Attic eloquence and Attic wit.—Lord
Macaulay.
The dependent scholar! The great man's licensed friend!—if friend, notslave, is to be the word. Believe me, Timocles, amid the humiliation anddrudgery of his lot, I know not where to turn for a beginning. Many, ifnot most, of his hardships are familiar to me; not, heaven knows, frompersonal experience, for I have never been reduced to such extremity, andpray that I never may be; but from the lips of numerous victims; from thebitter outcries of those who were yet in the snare, and the complacentrecollections of others who, like escaped prisoners, found a pleasure indetailing all that they had been through. The evidence of the latter wasparticularly valuable. Mystics, as it were, of the highest grade,Dependency had no secrets for them. Accordingly, it was with keeninterest that I listened to their stories of miraculous deliverance frommoral shipwreck. They reminded me of the mariners who, duly cropped,gather at the doors of a temple, with their tale of stormy seas andmonster waves and promontories, castings out of cargoes, snappings ofmasts, shatterings of rudders; ending with the appearance of those twinbrethren [Footnote: The Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, who were supposed toappear to sailors in distress.] so indispensable to nautical story, or ofsome other deus ex machina, who, seated at the masthead orstanding at the helm, guides the vessel to some sandy shore, there tobreak up at her leisure—not before her crew (so benevolent is the God!)have effected a safe landing. The mariner, however, is liberal inembellishment, being prompted thereto by the exigencies of his situation;for by his appearance as a favourite of heaven, not merely a victim offortune, the number of the charitable is increased. It is otherwise withthose whose narrative is of domestic storms, of billows rising mountainhigh (if so I may phrase it) within four walls. They tell us of theseductive calm