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.

398 SALMAGUNDI.
great self-congratulation we find that suspicion has never pointed
to us as the authors of Salmagundi. Our grey-beard speculations have been most bountifully attributed to sundry smart
young gentlemen, who, for aught we know, have no beards at
all; and we have often been highly amused, when they were
charged with the sin of writing what their harmless minds never
conceived; to see them affect all the blushing modesty and
beautiful embarrassment of detected virgin authors. The profound and penetrating public, having so long been led away from
truth and nature by a constant perusal of those delectable histories, and romances, from beyond seas, in which human nature
is, for the most part, wickedly mangled and debauched, have
never once imagined this work was a genuine and most authentic
history; that the Cocklofts were a real family, dwelling in the
city, paying scot and lot, entitled to the right of suffrage,
and holding several respectable offices in the corporation. As
little do they suspect that there is a knot of merry old bachelors
seated snugly in the old-fashioned parlor of an old-fashioned
Dutch house, with a weathercock on the top that came from
Holland; who amuse themselves of an evening by laughing at
their neighbors, in an honest way, and who manage to jog on
through the streets of our ancient and venerable city, without
elbowing or being elbowed by a living soul.
When we first adopted the idea of discontinuing this work, we
determined, in order to give the critics a fair opportunity for
dissection, to declare ourselves, one and all, absolutely defunct;
for it is one of the rare and invaluable privileges of a periodical
writer, that by an act of innocent suicide he may lawfully consign himself to the grave, and cheat the world of posthumous
renown. But we abandoned this scheme for many substantial
reasons. In the first place, we care but little for the opinion of