ntitled _Life and Letters, by
His Widow_. The best novel or life-story ever written does not
commence with its opening page. The real commencement goes back to
the Stone ages or at any rate to the antecedent circumstances which
led up to the crisis or the formation of the characters portrayed.
Mr. Pickwick had a father, a grandfather; a mother in a mob-cap; in
the eighteenth century. It is permissible to speculate on their
stories and dispositions. Neither does a novel or a biography end
with the final page of its convenient instalment.

When you lay down the book which describes the pathetic failure of
Lord Randolph Churchill, you do so with curiosity as to what will
become of Winston. With a pre-knowledge of the Pickwick Club, one
may usefully employ the imagination in tracing out the possible
careers of Sam Weller's chubby little boys; grown into old men, and
themselves, perchance, leaving progeny that may have married into
the peerage from the Turf, or have entered the War Cabinet at the
beckoning of Mr. Lloyd George.

I know of descendants of Madame de Brinvilliers in England who have
helped to found the Y.W.C.A.; and collateral offshoots from the
Charlotte Corday stock who are sternly opposed to the assassination
of statesmen-journalists.

So, I have taken on myself the continuation of the story outlined
twenty-three years ago by Mr. Shaw in its late Victorian stage. _He_
had a prior claim to do so; just as he might have shown us the
life--but not the letters, for she was illiterate--of Catherine
Warren's mother, the frier of fish and letter of lodgings on Tower
Hill in the 'forties and 'fifties of the last century; and of the
young Lieutenant Warren of the Tower garrison who lodged and
cohabited with her at intervals between 1850 and 1854, when he went
out to the Crimea and there died of frost-bite and neglected wounds.
Mr. Shaw has waived such claims, having, as Vivie's grandmother
would have said, "other fish to fry." But for this I should not have
ventured to take up the tale, as I hold an author while he lives has
a prescriptive right to his creations. I shall feel no bitterness in
Nirvana if, after my death, another continues the story of Vivie or
of her friends and collateral relations, under circumstances which I
shall not live to see.

In justice to Mr. Shaw I should state that the present book is
entirely my own, and that though he has not renounced a polite
interest in Vivie he is in no way respon