fancy, attractions that, in the language of reviewers, are styled under the head of "most striking descriptions," "scenes of extraordinary power,” &c.; and are derived from violent contrasts and exaggerations pushed into caricature. It has been my aim to subdue and tone down the persons introduced, and the general agencies of the narrative, into the lights and shadows of life as it is. I do not mean by "life as it is," the vulgar and the outward life alone, but life in its spiritual and mystic as well as its more visible and fleshly characteristics. The idea of not only describing, but developing character under the ripening influences of time and circumstance, is not confined to the apprenticeship of Maltravers alone, but pervades the progress of Cesarini, Ferrers, and Alice Darvil. The original conception of Alice is taken from real life-from a person I never saw but twice, and then she was no longer young-but whose history made on me a deep impression. Her early ignorance and home-her first love-the strange and affecting fidelity that she maintained, in spite of new ties-her final re-meeting, almost in middle age, with one lost and adored almost in childhood-all this, as shewn in the novel, is but the imperfect transcript of the true adventures of a living woman. In regard to Maltravers himself, I must own that I have but inadequately struggled against the great and obvious difficulty of representing an author living in our own times, with whose supposed works or alleged genius, and those of any one actually existing, the reader can establish no identification, and he is therefore either compelled constantly to humour the delusion by keeping his imagination on the stretch, or lazily driven to confound the Author in the Book with the Author of the Book. But I own, also, I fancied while aware of this objection, and in spite of it, that so much not hitherto said might be conveyed with advantage through the lips or in the life of an imaginary writer of our own time, that I was contented, on the whole, either to task the imagination, or submit to the suspicions of the reader. All that my own egotism appropriates in the book are some occasional remarks, the natural result of * In some foreign journal I have been much amused by a credulity of this latter description, and seen the various adventures of Mr. Maltravers gravely appropriated to the embellishment of my own quiet life, including the attachment to the original of poor Alice Darvil; who now, by the way, must be at least seventy years of age, with a grandchild nearly as old as myself. practical experience. With the life or the character, the adventures or the humours, the errors or the good qualities, of Maltravers himself, I have nothing to do, except as the narrator and inventor. Piccadilly. E. L. B. ERNEST MALTRAVERS. BOOK I. Τὸ γὰρ νεάζον ἐν τοιδισδε βόσκεται Αλλ' ἡδοναῖς ἄμοχθον ἐξαίρει βίον.—SOPH. Trachin. 144. "Youth pastures in a valley of its own: The glare of noon-the rains and winds of heaven Mar not the calm yet virgin of all care. But ever with sweet joys it buildeth up B |