A Hundred Merry Tales — William Hazlitt / William Carew Hazlitt

From the EDITOR'S PREFACE.C THERE may be some, who will attach value and interest to the singular old volume, now first reproduced in exact imitation of the original, on account of the casual mention of it by Shakespeare in one of his plays; but I hope and think that many more will welcome its appearance on another and higher ground, and will become of opinion that, where a solitary copy of such a relic as the earliest jest-book in the national tongue of England is only to be found in a foreign repository, and is liable to destruction at any moment, the survival, not of its mere substance alone, but of its very identity, in the shape of a facsimile, is one of those minor duties, which we owe to succeeding generations.
In the good former days, a gentleman who did his friends and the public the favour of reprinting a curious old book, was regarded as a sort of benefactor by a few who knew a little about the matter, and by the greater number, who knew nothing, he was considered a person of elegant tastes and of liberal disposition; for he usually engaged in the speculation on his own responsibility. The case is now altogether altered, and anyone who proposes to give to the world a new edition of an old book or tract, is in peril of being received as a Frenchman receives the news of his third child, unless he can make out a pretty strong plea for his proceeding. He must bring his justification in his hand. The burden of proof is upon him.
In the present instance, the enterprise on which the Editor has entered, is one which seems, at first sight, not to be without its element of superfluity, for in 1866 the book which is now in question was brought out under the care of Dr. Herman Oesterley from the same copy which I employ.
But I believe that I hold, notwithstanding, a very fair brief for my clients; for it was considered that the "Hundred Merry Tales" had so many claims to special consideration: -as being the most ancient book of its kind in the English language; as existing only in a complete state in a single copy preserved in a Continental library; and as the volume, out of which, in "Much Ado about Nothing," 1600, Beatrice tells us she had been charged with stealing all her good wit. So the great poet makes her say, at least; but the accusation was, so far as we can judge, an unfair one, and between the wit of the book and that of the lady there is little in common.
When the present editor republished the work as one of a collection more than twenty years ago, he had access only to the text of Singer; he had, at a later period, an opportunity of collating it with the original, at that time in the possession of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps; but the copy, as it is tolerably well-known, had been made up from an assortment of mutilated leaves, and presented a considerable number of lacunae, including entire tales, so that, until the Gottingen copy occurred, we had. in fact no means of studying this, in every sense, unique publication in its full integrity."