TO RICHARD BENTLEY, ESQ.

My dear Sir,

You wish me to collect into a single volume certain rambling extracts from our family memoranda, many of which have already appeared in the pages of your Miscellany. At the same time you tell me that doubts are entertained in certain quarters as to the authenticity of their details.

Now with respect to their genuineness, the old oak chest, in which the originals are deposited, is not more familiar to my eyes than it is to your own; and if its contents have any value at all, it consists in the strict veracity of the facts they record.

To convince the most incredulous, I can only add, that should business—pleasure is out of the question—ever call them into the neighbourhood of Folkestone, let them take the high road from Canterbury to Dover till they reach the eastern extremity of Barham Downs. Here a beautiful green lane diverging abruptly to the right will carry them through the Oxenden plantations and the unpretending village of Denton, to the foot of a very respectable hill,—as hills go in this part of Europe. On reaching its summit let them look straight before them,—and if, among the hanging woods which crown the opposite side of the valley, they cannot distinguish an antiquated Manor-house of Elizabethan architecture, with its gable ends, stone stanchions, and tortuous chimneys rising above the surrounding trees, why—the sooner they procure a pair of Dollond’s patent spectacles the better.

If, on the contrary, they can manage to descry it, and, proceeding some five or six furlongs through the avenue, will ring at the Lodge gate,—they cannot mistake the stone lion with the Ingoldsby escutcheon (Ermine, a saltire engrailed Gules) in his paws,—they will be received with a hearty old English welcome.

The papers in question having been written by different parties, and at various periods, I have thought it advisable to reduce the more ancient of them into a comparatively modern phraseology, and to make my collateral ancestor, Father John especially, “deliver himself like a man of this world;” Mr. Maguire, indeed, is the only Gentleman who, in his account of the late Coronation, retains his own rich vernacular.

As to arrangement, I shall adopt the sentiment expressed by the Constable of Bourbon four centuries ago, teste Shakspeare, one which seems to become more fashionable every day,

Believe me to be,

My dear Sir,
Yours, most indubitably and immeasurably,

THOMAS INGOLDSBY.

Tappington Everard,
Jan. 20, 1840.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

TO RICHARD BENTLEY, ESQ.

My dear Sir,

I should have replied sooner to your letter, but that the last three days in January are, as you are aware, always dedicated, at the Hall, to an especial battue, and the old house is full of shooting-jackets, shot-belts, and “double Joes.” Even the women wear percussion caps, and your favourite (?) Rover, who, you may remember, examined the calves of your legs with such suspicious curiosity at Christmas, is as pheasant-mad as if he were a biped, instead of being a genuine four-legged scion of the Blenheim breed. I have managed, however, to avail myself of a lucid interval in the general hallucination (how the rain did come down on Monday!), and as you tell me the excellent friend whom you are in the habit of styling “a Generous and Enlightened Public” has emptied your shelves of the first edition, and “asks for more,” why, I agree with you, it would be a want of respect to that very respectable personification, when furnishing him with a further supply, not to endeavour, at least, to amend my faults, which are few, and your own, which are more numerous. I have, therefore, gone to work con amore, supplying occasionally on my own part a deficient note, or elucidatory stanza, and on yours knocking out, without remorse, your superfluous i’s, and now and then eviscerating your colon.

My duty to your illustrious friend thus performed, I have viii a crow to pluck with him.—Why will he persist—as you tell me he does persist—in calling me by all sorts of names but those to which I am entitled by birth and baptism—my “Sponsorial and Patronymic appellations,” as Dr. Pangloss has it?—Mrs. Malaprop complains, and with justice, of an “assault upon her parts of speech,” but to attack one’s very existence—to deny that one is a person in esse, and scarcely to admit that one may be a person in posse, is tenfold cruelty;—“it is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging!”—let me entreat all such likewise to remember, that as Shakspeare beautifully expresses himself elsewhere—I give his words as quoted by a very worthy Baronet in a neighbouring county, when protesting against a defamatory placard at a general election—

In order utterly to squabash and demolish every gainsayer, I had thought, at one time, of asking my old and esteemed friend, Richard Lane, to crush them at once with his magic pencil, and to transmit my features to posterity, where all his works are sure to be “delivered according to the direction;” but somehow the noble-looking profiles which he has recently executed of the Kemble family put me a little out of conceit of my own, while the undisguised amusement which my “Mephistopheles Eyebrow,” as he termed it, afforded him, in the “full face,” induced me to lay aside the design. Besides, my dear Sir, since, as has well been observed, “there never was a married man yet who had not somebody remarkably like him walking about town,” it is a thousand to one but my lineaments might, after all, out of sheer perverseness, be ascribed to any body rather than to the real owner. I have therefore sent you, instead thereof, a fair sketch of Tappington, taken ix from the Folkestone road (I tore it last night out of Julia Simpkinson’s album); get Gilks to make a woodcut of it. And now, if any miscreant (I use the word only in its primary and “Pickwickian” sense of “Unbeliever,”) ventures to throw any further doubt upon the matter, why, as Jack Cade’s friend says in the play, “There are the chimneys in my father’s house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it!”

“Why very well then—we hope here be truths!”

Heaven be with you, my dear Sir!—I was getting a little excited; but you, who are mild as the milk that dews the soft whisker of the new-weaned kitten, will forgive me when, wiping away the nascent moisture from my brow, I “pull in,” and subscribe myself.

Yours quite as much as his own,

THOMAS INGOLDSBY

Tappington Everard,
Feb. 2, 1848.

1 A reading which seems most unaccountably to have escaped the researches of all modern Shakspearians, including the rival editors of the new and illustrated versions.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Rackham Illustrations

The Dent & Dutton edition came with its own list of illustrations, divided into three categories: full-color plates, images with background tint, and line drawings. Page references are retained for completeness; all illustrations have been put as close as practicable to the text they refer to. The original frontispiece has been moved to its natural place in the text. The Pentacle (page 142) was omitted because it is essentially the same as the earlier edition.