Classicly

To aggravate my situation, in the letter accompanying the manuscript, after several pages of the discriminating praise most dear to a writer’s heart, he did me the supreme honor of saying that in his work he had “striven to copy as closely as might be your style and your methods—to help me to the hearing I want and to lighten your labors as editor.” I assure him and the public that in any event I should have done little editing of his curious production beyond such as a proofreader might have found necessary. As it is, I have done practically no editing at all. In form and in substance, from title to finis, the work is his. I am merely its sponsor—and in circumstances that would forbid me were I disposed to qualify my sponsorship with even so mild a disclaimer as reluctance.