Most authors know how their interests are affected wholesale by that modern system of subscription libraries: but cheapness pleases the voracious multitude, and so in this competitive free-trade era the units who feed those devourers are swallowed up themselves.

However, "what must be, must,"-- _che sara sara_,--and I care not even to complain of what cannot be helped, and wins fame to the one, whilst it does good to the many, though financially unprofitable to individual authorship.
In the scarce copy of "AEsop Smith" now before me, I find a few manuscript notes of mine perhaps worth transcribing.

One has it, "This book is actually autobiographical; but (as Rabelais did) I often mix up irrelevant and extraneous matter by way of gilding pills, &c., and that &c.

is like one of Coke's upon Littleton, full of hints to be amplified." Further, "Let readers remember that this book was written and published long before recent changes in our laws of marriage and divorce and libel: also when no Englishman dared to go bearded, and no civilian was permitted to be armed.

In advocacy of all these things and many more, then unheard of but now common, I was in advance of the age; and in some degree my private notions conduced to very wholesome public changes." Again: "When Rabelais is diffuse, or a buffoon, or worse, it may be to throw disputers off the scent as to his real mark of satire or philosophy.