uke, a secret and
mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their
properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines,
trap-doors, and dark-lanterns? Or if I had rather chosen to call my work
a 'Sentimental Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a
heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace
of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of
transporting from castle to cottage, although she herself be sometimes
obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, and is more than
once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but
a blowzy peasant girl, whose jargon she hardly can understand? Or again,
if my WAVERLEY had been entitled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou
not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the
fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled,
and if lusciously painted, so much the better? a heroine from Grosvenor
Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four-in-hand, with a
set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street
East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow Street Office? I could proceed in
proving the importance of a title-page, and displaying at the same time
my own intimate knowledge of the particular ingredients necessary to the
composition of romances and novels of various descriptions: but it
is enough, and I scorn to tyrannize longer over the impatience of my
reader, who is doubtless already anxious to know the choice made by an
author so profoundly versed in the different branches of his art.

By fixing, then, the date of my story Sixty Years before the present 1st
November, 1805, I would have my readers understand, that they will meet
in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of
modern manners; that my hero will neither have iron on his shoulders,
as of yore, nor on the heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of
Bond Street; and that my damsels will neither be clothed 'in purple
and in pall,' like the Lady Alice of an old ballad, nor reduced to the
primitive nakedness of a modern fashionable at a rout. From this my
choice of an era the understanding critic may further presage, that the
object of my tale is more a description of men than manners. A tale of
manners, to be interesting, must either refer to antiquity so great as
to have become venerable, or it must bear a vivid reflec