The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lucretia, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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Title: Lucretia, Complete

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 16, 2009 [EBook #7691]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LUCRETIA

By Edward Bulwer Lytton

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1853.

"Lucretia; or, The Children of Night," was begun simultaneously with
"The Caxtons: a Family Picture." The two fictions were intended as
pendants; both serving, amongst other collateral aims and objects, to
show the influence of home education, of early circumstance and example,
upon after character and conduct. "Lucretia" was completed and published
before "The Caxtons." The moral design of the first was misunderstood
and assailed; that of the last was generally acknowledged and approved:
the moral design in both was nevertheless precisely the same. But in
one it was sought through the darker side of human nature; in the other
through the more sunny and cheerful: one shows the evil, the other the
salutary influences, of early circumstance and training. Necessarily,
therefore, the first resorts to the tragic elements of awe and
distress,--the second to the comic elements of humour and agreeable
emotion. These differences serve to explain the different reception that
awaited the two, and may teach us how little the real conception of an
author is known, and how little it is cared for; we judge, not by the
purpose he conceives, but according as the impressions he effects are
pleasurable or painful. But while I cannot acquiesce in much of the
hostile criticism this fiction produced at its first appearance, I
readily allow that as a mere question of art the story might have been
improved in itself, and rendered more acceptable to the reader, by
diminishing the gloom of the catastrophe. In this edition I have
endeavoured to do so; and the victim whose fate in the former cast
of the work most revolted the reader, as a violation of the trite but
amiable law of Poetical Justice, is saved from the hands of the Children
of Night. Perhaps, whatever the