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

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Title: Devereux, Complete

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 2005 [EBook #7630]
Posting Date: March 16, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEVEREUX, COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger and Dagny

DEVEREUX

BY

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON (Lord Lytton)

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE PRESENT EDITION.

IN this edition of a work composed in early youth, I have not attempted
to remove those faults of construction which may be sufficiently
apparent in the plot, but which could not indeed be thoroughly rectified
without re-writing the whole work. I can only hope that with the defects
of inexperience may be found some of the merits of frank and artless
enthusiasm. I have, however, lightened the narrative of certain
episodical and irrelevant passages, and relieved the general style of
some boyish extravagances of diction. At the time this work was written
I was deeply engaged in the study of metaphysics and ethics, and out of
that study grew the character of Algernon Mordaunt. He is represented
as a type of the Heroism of Christian Philosophy,--a union of love and
knowledge placed in the midst of sorrow, and labouring on through the
pilgrimage of life, strong in the fortitude that comes from belief in
Heaven.

KNEBWORTH, May 3, 1852.

E. B. L.

DEDICATORY EPISTLE

TO

JOHN AULDJO, ESQ., ETC.,

AT NAPLES

LONDON.

MY DEAR AULDJO,--Permit me, as a memento of the pleasant hours we passed
together, and the intimacy we formed by the winding shores and the rosy
seas of the old Parthenope, to dedicate to you this romance. It was
written in perhaps the happiest period of my literary life,--when
success began to brighten upon my labours, and it seemed to me a fine
thing to make a name. Reputation, like all possessions, fairer in the
hope than the reality, shone before me in the gloss of novelty; and I
had neither felt the envy it excites, the weariness it occasions, nor
(worse than all) that coarse and painful notoriety, that, something
between the gossip and the slander, which atte