"The Ingoldsby Legends" (1907)

"Preface to the 1st Series"

 

You wish me to collect into one single volume certain rambling extracts from our family memoranda, many of which have already appeared in the pages of your Miscellany.

At the same time you tell me that doubts are entertained in certain quarters as to the authenticity of their details.

 

Now with respect to their genuineness, the old oak chest, in which the originals are deposited, is not more familiar to my eyes than it is to your own; and if its contents have

any value at all, it consists in the strict veracity of the facts they record.

 

To convince the most incredulous, I can only add, that should business - pleasure is out of the question - ever call them into the neighbourhood of Folkestone, let them take

the high road from Canterbury to Dover till they reach the eastern extremity of Barham Downs. Here a beautiful green lane diverging abruptly to the right will carry them

through the Oxenden plantations and the unpretending village of Denton, to the foot of a very respectable hill - as hills go in this part of Europe. On reaching its summit let

them look straight before them - and if among the handing woods which crown the opposite side of the valley, they cannot distinguish an antiquated Manor-house of

Elizabethan architecture, with its gable ends, stone stanchions, and tortuous chimneys rising above the surrounding trees, why - the sooner they procure a pair of Dollond's

patent spectacles the better.

 

If, on the contrary, they can manage to descry it, and, proceeding some five or six furlongs through the avenue, will ring at the Lodge-gate - they cannot mistake the stone lion

with the Ingoldsby escutcheon (Ermine, a saltire engrailed Gules) in his paws - they will be received with a hearty old English welcome.

 

The papers in question have been written by different parties, and at various periods, I have thought it advisable to reduce the more ancient of them into a comparatively

modern phraseology, and to make my collateral ancestor, Father John, especially, "deliver himself like a man of this world"; Mr. Maguire, indeed, is the only Gentleman who,

in his account of the late Coronation, retains his own rich vernacular.

 

As to the arrangement, I shall adopt the sentiment expressed by the Constable of Bourbon four centuries ago, 'teste' Shakespeare, one which seems to become more

fashionable every day:

"The Devil take all order !! - I'll to the throng!

 

 

"Preface to the 2nd Series"

 

I should have replied sooner to your letter, but that the last three days in January are, as you are aware, always dedicated, at the Hall, to an especial 'battue', and the old

house is full of shooting-jackets, shot-belts, and "double Joes." Even the women wear percussion caps, and your favourite (?) Rover, who, you may remember, examined

the calves of your legs with such suspicious curiosity at Christmas, is as pheasant-mad as if he were a biped, instead of being a genuine four-legged scion of the Blenheim

breed. I have managed, however, to avail myself of a lucid interval in the general hallucination (how the raid 'did' come down on Monday!), and as you tell me the excellent

friend whom you in are in the habit of styling "A Generous and Enlightened Public" has emptied your shelves of the first edition, and "asks for more," why, I agree with you,

it 'would' be a want of 'respect' to that very 'respectable' personification, when furnishing him with a further supply, not to endeavour at least to amend my faults, which are few,

and your own, which are more numerous. I have, therefore, gone to work 'con amore', supplying occasionally on my own part a deficient note, or elucidatory stanza, and on

yours knocking out, without remorse, your superfluous 'i's', and now and then eviscerating your 'colon'.

 

My duty to our illustrious friend, thus performed, I have a crow to pluck with him, - Why will he persist - as you tell me he does persist - in calling me by all sorts of names but

those to which I am entitled by birth and baptism - my "Sponsorial and Patronymic appellations," as Dr. Pangloss has it? - Mrs. Malaprop complains, and with justice, of an

"assault upon her parts of speech:" but to attack one's very existence - to deny that one 'is' a person 'in esse', and scarcely to admit that one 'may be' a person 'in posse', is

tenfold cruelty; - "it is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging!" - let me entreat all such likewise to remember that, as Shakespeare beautifully expresses himself

elsewhere - I give his words as quoted by a very worthy Baronet in a neighbouring county, when protesting against a defamatory placard at a general election:

"Who steals my purse steals stuff! -

'Twas mine - 'tisn't his - nor nobody elses!

But he who runs away with the Good Name,

Robs me of what does not do him any good,

And makes me deuced poor!!"*

* A reading which seems most unaccountably to have escaped the researches of all modern Shakespeareans, including the rival editors of the new and illustrated versions.

 

In order utterly t squabash and demolish every gainsayer, I had thought, at one time, of asking my old and esteemed friend, Richard Lane, to crush them at once with his magic

pencil, and to transmit my features to posterity, where all his works are sure to be "delivered according to the direction;" but somehow the noble-looking profiles which he has

recently executed of the Kemble family put me a little out of conceit with my own, while the undisguised amusement which my "Mephistopheles Eyebrow," as he termed it,

afforded him, in the "full face," induced me to lay aside the design. Besides, my dear Sir, since, as has well been observe, "there never as a married man yet who had not

somebody remarkably like him walking about town," it is a thousand to one but my lineaments might, after all, out of sheer perverseness be ascribed to anybody rather than to

the real owner. I have therefore sent you, instead thereof, a very fair sketch of Tappington, taken from the Folkestone road (I tore it last night out of Julia Simpkinson's 'album');

get Gilks to make a wood-cut of it. And now, if any miscreant (I use the word only in its primary and "Pickwickian" sense of "Unbeliever,") ventures to throw any further doubt

upon the matter, why, as Jack Cade's friend says in the play, "There are the chimneys in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it!"

 

"Why, very well then - we hope here be truths!"

 

Heaven be with you, my dear Sir! - I was getting a little excited; but you, who are mild as the milk that dews the soft whisker of the new-weaned kitten, will forgive me when,

wiping away the nascent moisture from my brow, I "pull in," and subscribe myself, yours quite as much as his own.