I cannot avoid the acknowledgment of the difficulty of the task I have undertaken; yet I have undertaken it voluntarily, and I shall discharge it to the best of my abilities, requesting those who hear me to allow for deficiencies, and to bear in mind the wide extent of my subject; inopem me copia fecit. What I most rely upon is your sympathy; and, as I proceed, I trust that I shall interest you: sympathy and interest are to a lecturer like the sun, the spring and the showers to nature—absolutely necessary to the production of blossoms and fruit.

May I venture to observe that my own life has been employed more in reading and conversation—in collecting and reflecting, than in printing and publishing; for I never felt the desire, so often experienced by others, of becoming an author. It was accident made me an author in the first instance: I was called a poet almost before I knew I could write poetry. Conscious superiority, if indeed it be superior, need not fear to have its self-love or its pride wounded; and contempt, the most absurd and debasing feeling that can actuate the human mind, must be far below the sphere in which lofty intellects live and move and have their being.

On the first examination of a work, especially a work of fiction and fancy, it is right to observe to what feeling or passion it addresses itself. And since passion has been appealed to, we may then, if only we be honest and good (for Poetry and all its sister arts presuppose a state of mind and a cultivation of taste correspondent to them, and cannot at once create it), determine what rank, what comparative estimation, we ought to give to this part of our nature;—whether it is one of those which though permanent in itself is perpetually varying the Objects that gratify it:—such as curiosity which turns with the disgust of satiety from the last novel or romance to devour a fresh one;