Confession of a Young Man

I say that the end of the Nineteenth Century cannot brag of a more original book than The Confessions of a Young Man, I shall be deemed boastful and arrogant, but if the reader does not lay the book aside, he will probably discover me to be a man who would speak truthfully on all occasions, even about his own writings, a subject which lends itself to the exposition of a great deal of hypocrisy and insincerity, vices peculiarly disagreeable to me, and which I would avoid in the preface as I have avoided them in the book. Therefore, I relate, that the adjectives that came up in my mind on looking through these Confessions were * original' and incomplete.'