aving shown my resolution to overleap the
barriers which your prudence has raised, I will be brief in noticing
that which is more peculiar to myself. It seems to be your opinion, that
the very office of an antiquary, employed in grave, and, as the
vulgar will sometimes allege, in toilsome and minute research, must be
considered as incapacitating him from successfully compounding a tale of
this sort. But permit me to say, my dear Doctor, that this objection
is rather formal than substantial. It is true, that such slight
compositions might not suit the severer genius of our friend Mr Oldbuck.
Yet Horace Walpole wrote a goblin tale which has thrilled through many a
bosom; and George Ellis could transfer all the playful fascination of
a humour, as delightful as it was uncommon, into his Abridgement of the
Ancient Metrical Romances. So that, however I may have occasion to rue
my present audacity, I have at least the most respectable precedents in
my favour.

Still the severer antiquary may think, that, by thus intermingling
fiction with truth, I am polluting the well of history with modern
inventions, and impressing upon the rising generation false ideas of the
age which I describe. I cannot but in some sense admit the force of this
reasoning, which I yet hope to traverse by the following considerations.

It is true, that I neither can, nor do pretend, to the observation of
complete accuracy, even in matters of outward costume, much less in the
more important points of language and manners. But the same motive
which prevents my writing the dialogue of the piece in Anglo-Saxon or in
Norman-French, and which prohibits my sending forth to the public this
essay printed with the types of Caxton or Wynken de Worde, prevents my
attempting to confine myself within the limits of the period in which my
story is laid. It is necessary, for exciting interest of any kind, that
the subject assumed should be, as it were, translated into the manners,
as well as the language, of the age we live in. No fascination has
ever been attached to Oriental literature, equal to that produced by Mr
Galland's first translation of the Arabian Tales; in which, retaining
on the one hand the splendour of Eastern costume, and on the other the
wildness of Eastern fiction, he mixed these with just so much ordinary
feeling and expression, as rendered them interesting and intelligible,
while he abridged the long-winded narratives, curtailed the monotonous
reflec