SEXAGENARIAN; OR, THE Becollections OF A LITERARY LIFE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. London: PRINTED FOR F. C. AND J. RIVINGTON, By R. and R. Gilbert, St. John's Square, Clerkenwell INTRODUCTION. AMONG various other particularities which marked the whimsicality of our Sexagenarian's character, there were discovered in his manuscript, a great many specimens of DEDICATIONS, ready cut and dried. Of these, some were inscribed with due solemnity to very great men, to Ministers, Prelates, Court Favourites, and so forth ; others were written in a less formal style to individuals of known genius, talents, and learning; one or two were of a playful kind, and addressed to old college friends and acquaintance; one more particularly was of a facetious tendency in the character of Satan to Bonaparte. Oh! that the Sexagenarian had but lived to witness the catastrophe of that miscreant adventurer! But of all these pieces, some composed with more and some with less care and circumspection, one more immediately forced itself upon the attention, inscribed TO AN OLD WOMAN. Something of an introduction seems indispensable on the present occasion, and perhaps nothing more to the purpose could easily be met with; so it is inserted verbatim et literatim from the original document. "Those were good old times for poor authors, when the usual accompaniment of an adulatory Dedication to some great personage, was ten pounds. no such thing now-a-days. Alas! there is It is well if when dismissed from the audience of the patron, you are bowed out with a little faint praise, and a civil leer. Yet such is the effect effect of habit, and so inconsistent is the character of man, that there are no authors of equal celebrity with myself, (hem!) who will condescend to place their works before the public, without a Dedication, or Inscription of one kind or other. "But as ill luck would have it, my literary pilgrimage has been so long and so extended, that I have exhausted my catalogue of illustrious names, numerous as it was. I am compelled, as the French term it, "jouer a coupe un," in other words, to play alone. I am reduced to the necessity of looking about for somebody who cannot in reason refuse the honour intended; from whom nothing is to be expected but a good-humoured acquiescence in whatever I may choose to say; whose vanity expects no flattery, whose pride can receive no wound. "Where then can I look with more complacency, comfort, and confidence, than to "MY DEAR OLD WOMAN? "Here |