Excerpt from The Cipher: In the Plays, and on the Tombstone
I almost feel as if I should apologize for presenting this book to the public.
There are figures enough in it to "make mad the guilty and appal the free." I fear I shall have to say, to the average reader, as Worcester said to Hotspur:
"You apprehend a world of figures here,
But not the form of what you should attend."
To many this work will appear as tempting as a table of logarithms; and they will refuse to pursue the riddle farther than the opening pages. They will say to themselves: - it is a herring, - full of bones.
I know how delightful it is to read a fascinating novel - to float in a golden gondola, down the stream of delicious romance, over the ripples of incident, amid the roseate hues of poetry; and to ask one to turn from this to 753+ 167+29= "the," etc., is asking a great deal.
And yet through this thorny and stony path, with its brambles and thistles, we advance into a new world, - more glorious than all the novels ever written.
The key may be old and rusty and complex; but if it opens Aladdin"s treasure cavern, from whose spoils one can purchase all the delights of the world, who will complain if he has to soil his fingers by inserting that key in the lock?
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