Tz.
Spitz.--Poor Spitz likes as well to be in Prefaces among Extra-Shoots
as his Master, and comes in just right with the Twenty-ninth Chapter. I
can talk for hours with Pomeranian dogs, as Yorick did with asses. I
will now set the messenger of the gods on his hind-feet and hold him by
the fore-paws, that he may listen to me in an erect posture.----"Stand,
nimble beast!--I talk with thee about something only that I may place
thee in the third Preface. It deserves, Spitz, to be remarked, that
thou art a rogue as men are, and like them wilt not remain _straight_,
but _crooked_ and bowed down, merely for the sake of eating well; thou
and they will, like Faro-cards, win by _bending_ and _crooking_, as the
common English bend their bad silver money that it may not be passed
for less, namely, two pieces for one. Thou hast false eyes, but
nevertheless thy actions are good. The reviewers, impatient cattle,
say, if they were in thy place, they would bring along the biographical
building-stuff more industriously, that the biography might be over
before it snows;--meet them not with the counter-assertion, that I
might do like Baronius, who began his annals without a beard and ended
them with a gray one. In that can only reviewers (but not I) imitate
him, who have time to polish, and who can begin a work beardless, on
shaving day, and not till three days after finish it, when they are
lathered.---Just fall down, Hofmann, and eat; thou art at least not
wholly without sense, and givest more heed to an harangue, after all,
than a Dauphin-fœtus, and at least waggest thy tail, which the
fœtus does not. I have now to talk with quite other people, and the
fewest possible among them wag their tails in token of appreciation,
Spitz!"