appreciable moral influence. But the sentiment
of each age is peculiar to itself; and the purely moral influence
of sentimental fiction seldom survives the age to which it was first
addressed. The youngest and most impressionable reader of such works as
the "Nouvelle Hemise," "Werther," "The Robbers," "Corinne," or "Rene,"
is not now likely to be morally influenced, for good or ill, by the
perusal of those masterpieces of genius. Had Byron attained the age
at which great authors most realise the responsibilities of fame and
genius, he might possibly have regretted, and endeavoured to suppress,
the publication of "Don Juan;" but the possession of that immortal poem
is an unmixed benefit to posterity, and the loss of it would have been
an irreparable misfortune.

"Falkland," although the earliest, is one of the most carefully finished
of its author's compositions. All that was once turbid, heating,
unwholesome in the current of sentiment which flows through this history
of a guilty passion, "Death's immortalising winter" has chilled and
purified. The book is now a harmless, and, it may be hoped, a not
uninteresting, evidence of the precocity of its author's genius. As
such, it is here reprinted.

[It was published in 1827]

FALKLAND.

BOOK I.

FROM ERASMUS FALKLAND, ESQ., TO THE HON. FREDERICK MONKTON.

L---, May --, 1822.

You are mistaken, my dear Monkton! Your description of the gaiety of
"the season" gives me no emotion. You speak of pleasure; I remember no
labour so wearisome; you enlarge upon its changes; no sameness appears
to me so monotonous. Keep, then, your pity for those who require it.
From the height of my philosophy I compassionate you. No one is so
vain as a recluse; and your jests at my hermitship and hermitage cannot
penetrate the folds of a self-conceit, which does not envy you in your
suppers at D---- House, nor even in your waltzes with Eleanor.

It is a ruin rather than a house which I inhabit. I have not been at
L----- since my return from abroad, and during those years the place
has gone rapidly to decay; perhaps, for that reason, it suits me better,
_tel maitre telle maison_.

Of all my possessions this is the least valuable in itself, and derives
the least interest from the associations of childhood, for it was not at
L----- that any part of that period was spent. I have, however, chosen
it from my present retreat, because here only I am personally unknown,
and therefore little