Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

ADVICE TO THE PUBLIC. 17
inhabitants the trouble of making a thousand wise conjectures,
not one of which would be worth a tobacco-stopper, we have
thought it in some degree a necessary exertion of charitable condescension to furnish them with a slight clue to the truth.
Before we proceed further, however, we advise everybody, man,
woman, and child, that can read, or get any friend to read for
them, to purchase this paper-not that we write for money,
for, in common with all philosophical wiseacres, from Solomon
downward, we hold it in supreme contempt. The public are welcome to buy this work, or not, just as they choose. If it be
purchased freely, so much the better for the public-and the
publisher-we gain not a stiver. If it be not purchased we
give fair warning-we shall burn all our essays, critiques, and
epigrams, in one promiscuous blaze; and, like the books of the
sibyls and the Alexandrian library, they will be lost forever to
posterity. For the sake, therefore, of our publisher, for the
sake of the public, and for the sake of the public's children to
the nineteenth generation, we advise them to purchase our paper.
We beg the respectable old matrons of this city not to be
alarmed at the appearance we make; we are none of those outlandish geniuses who swarm in New York, who live by their wits,
or rather by the little wit of their neighbors, and who spoil the
genuine honest American tastes of their daughters with French
slops and fricasseed sentiment.
We have said we do not write for money-neither do we
write for fame; we know too well the variable nature of public
opinion, to build our hopes upon it-we care not what the public
think of us, and we suspect, before we reach the tenth number,
they will not know what to think of us. In two words, we
write for no other earthly purpose but to please ourselves-and
this we shall be sure of doing, for we are all three of us deter