o understand why an author not unfrequently makes favourites
of some of his productions most condemned by the public. For my own
part, I remember that "Devereux" pleased me better than "Pelham" or
"The Disowned," because the execution more exactly corresponded with the
design. It expressed with tolerable fidelity what I meant it to express.
That was a happy age, my dear Auldjo, when, on finishing a work, we
could feel contented with our labour, and fancy we had done our best!
Now, alas I I have learned enough of the wonders of the Art to recognize
all the deficiencies of the Disciple; and to know that no author worth
the reading can ever in one single work do half of which he is capable.

What man ever wrote anything really good who did not feel that he had
the ability to write something better? Writing, after all, is a cold and
a coarse interpreter of thought. How much of the imagination, how much
of the intellect, evaporates and is lost while we seek to embody it
in words! Man made language and God the genius. Nothing short of an
eternity could enable men who imagine, think, and feel, to express
all they have imagined, thought, and felt. Immortality, the spiritual
desire, is the intellectual _necessity_.

In "Devereux" I wished to portray a man flourishing in the last century
with the train of mind and sentiment peculiar to the present; describing
a life, and not its dramatic epitome, the historical characters
introduced are not closely woven with the main plot, like those in
the fictions of Sir Walter Scott, but are rather, like the narrative
romances of an earlier school, designed to relieve the predominant
interest, and give a greater air of truth and actuality to the supposed
memoir. It is a fiction which deals less with the Picturesque than the
Real. Of the principal character thus introduced (the celebrated and
graceful, but charlatanic, Bolingbroke) I still think that my sketch,
upon the whole, is substantially just. We must not judge of the
politicians of one age by the lights of another. Happily we now demand
in a statesman a desire for other aims than his own advancement; but at
that period ambition was almost universally selfish--the Statesman was
yet a Courtier--a man whose very destiny it was to intrigue, to plot, to
glitter, to deceive. It is in proportion as politics have ceased to be
a secret science, in proportion as courts are less to be flattered and
tools to be managed, that politicians have become