Prose and Verse Author:Thomas Hood Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PROSE AND VERSE, PREFACE TO HOOD'S OWN. AN INAUGURAL DISCOURSE ON A CERTAIN SYSTEM OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY. Courteous Reader ! Presuming that you hav... more »e known something of the Comic Annual from its Child-Hood, when it was first put into half binding and began to run alone, I make bold to consider you as an old friend of the family, and shall accordingly treat you with all the freedom and confidence that pertain to such ripe connexions. How many years is it, think you, "since we were first acquent ?" " By the deep nine /" sings out the old bald Count Fathom with the lead-line: no great lapse in the world's chronology, but a space of infinite importance in individual history. For instance, it has wrought a serious change on the body, if not on the mind, of your very humble servant;—it is not, however, to bespeak your sympathy, or to indulge in what Lord Byron calls "the gloomy vanity of drawing from self," that I allude to my personal experience. The Scot and lot character of the dispensation forbids me to think that the world in general can be particularly interested in the state of my Household Sufferage, or that the public ear will be as open to my Maladies as to my Melodies. The simple truth is, that, being a wiser but not. sadder man, I propose to admit you to my Private View of a ays. tem of Practical Cheerful Philosophy, thanks to which, perchance, the cranium of your Humorist is still secure from such a lecture as was delivered over the skull of Poor Yorick. In the absence of a certain thin " blue-and-yellow " visage, and attenuated figure,—whose effigies may one day be affixed to the present work,—you will not be prepared to learn that some of the merriest effusions in the forthcoming numbers have been the relaxations of a gentleman literally enjoying bad...« less