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Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855,

By J. S. REDFIELD,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Southern District of New York.

STEREOTYPED BY C. C. SAVAGE,
13 Chambers Street, N. Y.

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

ON WILLIAM MAGINN's death it was truly stated, by a writer in Fraser's Magazine, that he had "resembled Swift not merely in his wit, but in the utter carelessness with which he regarded the fate of the productions of his genius. If they served the purpose of the moment, whether it were to make a minister tremble or a lady smile, 'the Doctor' never troubled himself further about his thunder or his jest. They might be claimed by any passer-by, for no one ever contributed more to the fame of others or so, completely disregarded his own. It is chiefly to this carelessness about all that more immediately affected him that we must ascribe the want of some one great work, whereby the Doctor might now be remembered. Though in a marked degree competent to bestow such a gift on the literary world, the natural discursiveness of his disposition induced him rather to find a ready vent for the superabundance of his learning and wit in the pages of the leading periodicals."

Maginn had what might be called a fatal facility of composition. The stores of his learning and knowledge were so vast that his memory ever found them exhaustless. The composition of a magazine-article, no matter what the subject, appeared to involve scarcely any thing more than the mere manual labour of putting it upon paper. He rarely had occasion to refer to authorities. He was a great reader, and what he once read ho never forgot.

Few men were equal to him in conversation-though he was the reverse of a great talker. It was the variety of topics upon which he threw a light, and not the diffuseness of his remarks, which gave a proper idea of the wealth of his conversation. Meet him when you might, turn the discourse into whatever channels you pleased, Maginn was master of every subject-the most recondite as well as the most familiar.

Careless of his fame, and too fond of society (and its temptations) to devote himself steadily and continuously to any one work, he has left behind him but disjecta membra poeta. He scattered-I might say wasted-his great powers on Magazines. All that he wrote was marked with originality and learning, wit and satire. They included a large range of subjects-poetry, politics, classics, antiquities, history, criticism, and fiction.

Under the sobriquet of MORGAN ODOHERTY, he first obtained a high reputation as a Magazine writer. The two volumes of “ODOHERTY PAPERS" which I now lay before the public, are principally taken from Blackwood. The remainder of this collection will include Maginn's Shakspere Papers, his Homeric Ballads, and other translations from the classics, his shorter prose stories, his miscellaneous poetry, and such of his Fraserian Papers as possess more than temporary interest. It may be well to add that most of the present volumes were published before Maginn had reached the age of thirty.

In the concluding portion of this collection of his Miscellaneous writings, I shall give a biography of Maginn, much more in detail than the Memoir which I wrote last year, for the closing volume of my edition of "THE NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ.”

R. SHELTON MACKENZIE,

NEW YORK,
April 14, 1855.

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