Page:Notes and Queries - Series 1 - Volume 1.djvu/12

2 Nay, we are sure that the proprietors would find themselves much benefited even if we were to do nothing more than to induce them to look over their own collections. How much good might we have done (as well as got, for we do not pretend to speak quite disinterestedly), if we had had the looking over and methodizing of the chaos in which Mr. Oldbuck found himself just at the moment, so agonizing to an author, when he knows that the patience of his victim is oozing away, and fears it will be quite gone before he can lay his hand on the charm which is to fix him a hopeless listener:—"So saying, the Antiquary opened a drawer, and began rummaging among a quantity of miscellaneous papers, ancient and modern. But it was the misfortune of this learned gentleman, as it may be that of many learned and unlearned, that he frequently experienced on such occasions, what Harlequin calls l'embarras des richesses—in other words, the abundance of his collection often prevented him from finding the article he sought for." We need not add that this unsuccessful search, for Professor MacCribb's epistle, and the scroll of the Antiquary's answer, was the unfortunate turning-point on which the very existence of the documents depended, and that from that day to this nobody has seen them, or known where to look for them.

But we hope for more extensive and important benefits, than these from furnishing a medium by which much valuable information may become a sort of common property among those who can appreciate and use it. We do not anticipate any holding back by those whose "" are most worth having, or any want of "" from those best able to answer them. Whatever may be the case in other things, it is certain that those who are best informed are generally the most ready to communicate knowledge and to confess ignorance, to feel the value of such a work as we are attempting, and to understand that if it is to be well done they must help to do it. Some cheap and frequent means for the interchange of thought s certainly wanted by those who are engaged in literature, art, and science, and we only hope to persuade the best men in all, that we offer them the best medium of communication with each other.

By this time, we hope, our readers are prepared to admit that our title (always one of the most difficult points of a book to settle), has not been imprudently or unwisely adopted. We wish to bring together the ideas and the wants, not merely of men engaged in the same lines of action or inquiry, but also (and very particularly) of those who are going different ways, and only meet at the crossings, where a helping hand is oftenest needed, and they would be happy to give one if they knew it was wanted. In this way we desire that our little book should take "," and be a medley of all that men are doing that the Notes of the writer and the reader, whatever be the subject-matter of his studies, of the antiquary, and the artist, the man of science, the historian, the herald, and the genealogist, in short, Notes relating to all subjects but such as are, in popular discourse, termed either political or polemical, should meet in our columns in such juxta-position, as to give fair play to any natural attraction or repulsion between them, and so that if there are any hooks and eyes among them, they may catch each other.

Now, with all modesty, we submit, that for the title of such a work as we have in view, and have endeavoured to describe, no word could be so proper as "." Can any man, in his wildest dream of imagination, conceive of any thing that may not be—nay, that has not been—treated of in a note? Thousands of things there are, no doubt, which cannot be sublimed into poetry, or elevated into history, or treated of with dignity, in a stilted text of any kind, and which are, as it is, called, "thrown" into notes; but, after all, they are much like children sent out of the