LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN
DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES ;
EXTRACTED FROM
FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES BY JEAN PAUL
LETTER TO MY FRIENDS
INSTEAD OF PREFACE
Merchants, Authors, young Ladies and Quakers, call all persons,
with whom they have any business, Friends ; and my readers accord-
ingly are my table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about
presenting so many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis
copies ; and my Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after
the Fair, with his copy in return for a trifling consideration and don
gratuit to printers, pressmen and other such persons. But as I could
not, like the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the
blank leaf in front was necessarily wanting ; and thus to write a com-
plimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore
caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page : on
these we are now printing.
My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a pleasure, as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should have offered his prize-medals not for the invention of new pleasures, but for a good mythodology and directory to use the old ones.
Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this : To soar away so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world, with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses and thunder-rods, lying far down beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is :
