will decidedly be disappointed. Those who seek for information or amusement, it will be his utmost endeavour to satisfy.
The object of the work is not biographical—it can be a matter of no moment to any one, ignorant of the fact, when or where the writer was born, what was his parentage, or what the nature of his education. Though the prejudice may run in favour of the usual number of limbs, and a limited quantity of back*, yet it would no more detract from my doings, for the stranger to be told that I was short of a leg, or had a hump on each shoulder, than it would add to them for him to hear I was a perfect Adonis.
I have stood in the dwellings, and beside the tombs, of some of earth's greatest people, with whose biography the world at large is perfectly familiar, and heard such monstrous falsehoods roundly asserted as truths, that I have returned home content, as a very little person, with the knowledge there was no biography of myself extant. In the room where Shakspeare is generally supposed to have been born, at Stratford-upon-Avon, my late esteemed and eminent friend, Charles Mathews, and I, have heard its defunct tenant, Mrs. Hornby, of garrulous memory, with a pair of bright blue eyes glistening under a flaxen front, positively aver, that a rusty rapier, hanging up over the mantel piece, was the identical one worn by the poet when he enacted the character of Romeo-a
The Rivals-Act III. Scene 1.