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A Fool's Errand

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Albion Winegar Tourgée

A Fool's Errand

(Forgotten Books July 23, 2012)
Gentlemex, Your demand that I should write a Preface to the book you have printed seems to me utterly preposterous. It is like a man introducing himself, always an awkward, and generally a useless piece of business. What is the use of the prologue to the epic coming on, anyhow, unless it be a sort of advertisement? and in that case you ought to write it. Whoever does that should be Wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a sort of wit. That is not the kind of Fool I am. All such work I delegate to you, and hereby authorize and empower you to say what you please of what I have written, only begging you keep in mind one clear distinction. There are two kinds of Fools. The real Fool is the most sincere of mortals: the Court Fool and his kind the trifling, jesting buffoon but simulate the family virtue, and steal the family name, for sordid purposes. The life of the Fool proper is full of the poetry of faith. He may run after a will-o -the-wisp, while the Wise deride; but to him it is a veritable star of hope. He differs from his fellow-mortals chiefly in this, that he sees or believes what they do not, and consequently undertakes what they never attempt. If he succeed in his endeavor, the world stops laughing, and calls him a Genius: if he fail, it laughs the more, and derides his undertaking as A Fool s Erraxd. So the same individual is often both fool and genius, a fool all his life and a genius after his death, or a fool to one century and a genius to the next, or a fool at home and a prodigy abroad.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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Weight
22.4 oz.
Dimensions
6.0 x 0.8 in.

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