Excerpt from Anecdote Lives of Wits and Humourists, Vol. 1 IF you love your readers, and wish to be read, get aneo dotes, is the sagacious advice to authors, in a contemporary critical journal and a kindred sense of the interest as well as the value of this species of reading has encouraged the production of the present volumes. Their immediate object is to collect and arrange, in the most entertaining as well as serviceable form, the salient points in the Lives of some of the leading Wits and Humorists who had adorned our literature. The advantages of such a plan have been thus enforced by one of the greatest masters, in saying that, Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, &c., have the same use with burn ing-glasses, - to collect the diffused rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination.1' The economy of the plan need not be insisted upon; if we are to trust the adage - that the wit of one is the wisdom of many. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.