n? Does he seem actuated by a desire to find out and
speak it? Is he a quack, who shams sentiment, or mouths for effect? Does
he seek popularity by claptraps or other arts? I can no more ignore good
fortune than any other chance which has befallen me. I have found many
thousands more readers than I ever looked for. I have no right to say
to these, You shall not find fault with my art, or fall asleep over my
pages; but I ask you to believe that this person writing strives to tell
the truth. If there is not that, there is nothing.

Perhaps the lovers of 'excitement' may care to know, that this book
began with a very precise plan, which was entirely put aside. Ladies
and gentlemen, you were to have been treated, and the writer's and the
publisher's pocket benefited, by the recital of the most active horrors.
What more exciting than a ruffian (with many admirable virtues) in St.
Giles's, visited constantly by a young lady from Belgravia? What
more stirring than the contrasts of society? the mixture of slang and
fashionable language? the escapes, the battles, the murders? Nay, up to
nine o'clock this very morning, my poor friend, Colonel Altamont, was
doomed to execution, and the author only relented when his victim was
actually at the window.

The 'exciting' plan was laid aside (with a very honourable forbearance
on the part of the publishers), because, on attempting it, I found that
I failed from want of experience of my subject; and never having been
intimate with any convict in my life, and the manners of ruffians and
gaol-birds being quite unfamiliar to me, the idea of entering into
competition with M. Eugene Sue was abandoned. To describe a real rascal,
you must make him so horrible that he would be too hideous to show; and
unless the painter paints him fairly, I hold he has no right to show him
at all.

Even the gentlemen of our age--this is an attempt to describe one of
them, no better nor worse than most educated men--even these we cannot
show as they are, with the notorious foibles and selfishness of their
lives and their education. Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no
writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost
power a MAN. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional
simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art. Many ladies
have remonstrated and subscribers left me, because, in the course of the
story, I described a young man resisting and affected by temp