faults of this work, it equals most of
its companions in the sustainment of interest, and in that coincidence
between the gradual development of motive or passion, and the sequences
of external events constituting plot, which mainly distinguish the
physical awe of tragedy from the coarse horrors of melodrama. I trust at
least that I shall now find few readers who will not readily acknowledge
that the delineation of crime has only been employed for the grave
and impressive purpose which brings it within the due province of the
poet,--as an element of terror and a warning to the heart.

LONDON, December 7.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

It is somewhere about four years since I appeared before the public as
the writer of a fiction, which I then intimated would probably be my
last; but bad habits are stronger than good intentions. When Fabricio,
in his hospital, resolved upon abjuring the vocation of the Poet, he
was, in truth, recommencing his desperate career by a Farewell to the
Muses,--I need not apply the allusion.

I must own, however, that there had long been a desire in my mind to
trace, in some work or other, the strange and secret ways through which
that Arch-ruler of Civilization, familiarly called "Money," insinuates
itself into our thoughts and motives, our hearts and actions; affecting
those who undervalue as those who overestimate its importance; ruining
virtues in the spendthrift no less than engendering vices in the miser.
But when I half implied my farewell to the character of a novelist,
I had imagined that this conception might be best worked out upon
the stage. After some unpublished and imperfect attempts towards so
realizing my design, I found either that the subject was too wide for
the limits of the Drama, or that I wanted that faculty of concentration
which alone enables the dramatist to compress multiform varieties into
a very limited compass. With this design, I desired to unite some
exhibition of what seems to me a principal vice in the hot and emulous
chase for happiness or fame, fortune or knowledge, which is almost
synonymous with the cant phrase of "the March of Intellect," in that
crisis of society to which we have arrived. The vice I allude to is
Impatience. That eager desire to press forward, not so much to conquer
obstacles as to elude them; that gambling with the solemn destinies
of life, seeking ever to set success upon the chance of a die; that
hastening from the wish conc