We have this week been called upon to take a step which neither our best
friends nor our own hopes could have anticipated. Having failed in our
endeavours to supply by other means the increasing demand for complete
sets of our "NOTES AND QUERIES," we have been compelled to reprint the
first four numbers.
It is with no slight feelings of pride and satisfaction that we record
the fact of a large impression of a work like the present not having
been sufficient to meet the demand,--a work devoted not to the
witcheries of poetry or to the charms of romance, but to the
illustration of matters of graver import, such as obscure points of
national history, doubtful questions of literature and bibliography, the
discussion of questionable etymologies, and the elucidation of old world
customs and observances.
What Mr. Kemble lately said so well with reference to archæology, our
experience justifies us in applying to other literary inquiries:--
"On every side there is evidence of a generous and earnest
co-operation among those who have devoted themselves to special
pursuits; and not only does this tend of itself to widen the
general basis, but it supplies the individual thinker with an
ever widening foundation for his own special study."
And whence arises this "earnest co-operation?" Is it too much to hope
that it springs from an increased reverence for the Truth, from an
intenser craving after a knowledge of it--whether such Truth regards an
event on which a throne depended, or the etymology of some household
word now familiar only to
"Hard-handed men who work in Athens here?"
We feel that the kind and earnest men who honour our "NOTES AND QUERIES"
with their correspondence, hold with Bacon, that
"Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry
of Truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it--the
knowledge of Truth, which is the presence of it--and the belief
of Truth, which is the enjoying of it--is the sovereign good of
human nature."
We believe that it is under the impulse of such feelings that they have
flocked to our columns--that the sentiment has found its echo in the
breast of the public, and hence that success which has attended our
humble efforts. The cause is so great, that we may well be pardoned if
we boast that we have had both hand and heart in it. {130}
And so, with all the earnestness and heartiness which befit this happy
season, when
"No spirit stirs abroad;
The nights are wholesome; when no planet strikes,
No fairy takes, no witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time,"
do we greet all our friends, whether contributors or readers, with the
good old English wish,