Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/12

vi (though not in time for your tour), I completed the scrawl from which this book was originally printed.

The very feeling, however, which enabled me to write thus freely, prevented me from robing my thoughts in that grave and decorous style which I should have maintained if I had professed to lecture the public. Whilst I feigned to myself that you, and you only, were listening, I could not by possibility speak very solemnly. Heaven forbid that I should talk to my own genial friend, as though he were a great and enlightened Community, or any other respectable Aggregate!

Yet I well understood that the mere fact of my professing to speak to you rather than to the public generally could not perfectly excuse me for printing a narrative too roughly worded, and accordingly, in revising the proof sheets, I have struck out those phrases which seemed to be less fit for a published volume than for intimate conversation. It is hardly to be expected, however, that correction of this kind should be perfectly complete, or that the almost boisterous tone in which many parts of the book were originally written should be thoroughly subdued. I venture therefore, to ask, that the familiarity of language still possibly apparent in the work, may be laid to the account of our delightful intimacy, rather than to any presumptuous motive; I feel, as you know, much too timidly—too distantly, and too respectfully, towards the Public to be capable of seeking to put myself on terms of easy fellowship with strange and casual readers.

It is right to forewarn people (and I have tried to do this as well as I can, by my studiously unpromising title-page )