If they choose to think so, they have a right to their opinion, and that opinion is fame.

I value this reputation too highly not to take care of it.
As I do not intend then to write often, I shall not wire-draw my subjects, for the mere purpose of filling my pages.

Still a book should be perfect within itself, and intelligible without reference to other books.

Authors are vain people, and vanity as well as dignity is indigenous to a colony.

Like a pastry-cook's apprentice, I see so much of both their sweet things around me daily, that I have no appetite for either of them.
I might perhaps be pardoned, if I took it for granted, that the dramatis personae of this work were sufficiently known, not to require a particular introduction.