Project Gutenberg's The Last Of The Barons, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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Title: The Last Of The Barons, Complete

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 16, 2009 [EBook #7727]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger

THE LAST OF THE BARONS

By Edward Bulwer Lytton

DEDICATORY EPISTLE.

I dedicate to you, my indulgent Critic and long-tried Friend, the work
which owes its origin to your suggestion. Long since, you urged me
to attempt a fiction which might borrow its characters from our own
Records, and serve to illustrate some of those truths which History is
too often compelled to leave to the Tale-teller, the Dramatist, and the
Poet. Unquestionably, Fiction, when aspiring to something higher than
mere romance, does not pervert, but elucidate Facts. He who employs it
worthily must, like a biographer, study the time and the characters
he selects, with a minute and earnest diligence which the general
historian, whose range extends over centuries, can scarcely be
expected to bestow upon the things and the men of a single epoch. His
descriptions should fill up with colour and detail the cold outlines
of the rapid chronicler; and in spite of all that has been argued by
pseudo-critics, the very fancy which urged and animated his theme
should necessarily tend to increase the reader's practical and familiar
acquaintance with the habits, the motives, and the modes of thought
which constitute the true idiosyncrasy of an age. More than all, to
Fiction is permitted that liberal use of Analogical Hypothesis which is
denied to History, and which, if sobered by research, and enlightened
by that knowledge of mankind (without which Fiction can neither harm
nor profit, for it becomes unreadable), tends to clear up much that
were otherwise obscure, and to solve the disputes and difficulties of
contradictory evidence by the philosophy of the human heart.

My own impression of the greatness of the labour to which you invited me
made me the more diffident of success, inasmuch as the field of English
historical