fiction had been so amply cultivated, not only by the most
brilliant of our many glorious Novelists, but by later writers of high
and merited reputation. But however the annals of our History have been
exhausted by the industry of romance, the subject you finally pressed
on my choice is unquestionably one which, whether in the delineation of
character, the expression of passion, or the suggestion of historical
truths, can hardly fail to direct the Novelist to paths wholly untrodden
by his predecessors in the Land of Fiction.

Encouraged by you, I commenced my task; encouraged by you, I venture,
on concluding it, to believe that, despite the partial adoption of that
established compromise between the modern and the elder diction,
which Sir Walter Scott so artistically improved from the more rugged
phraseology employed by Strutt, and which later writers have perhaps
somewhat overhackneyed, I may yet have avoided all material trespass
upon ground which others have already redeemed from the waste. Whatever
the produce of the soil I have selected, I claim, at least, to have
cleared it with my own labour, and ploughed it with my own heifer.

The reign of Edward IV. is in itself suggestive of new considerations
and unexhausted interest to those who accurately regard it. Then
commenced the policy consummated by Henry VII.; then were broken up the
great elements of the old feudal order; a new Nobility was called
into power, to aid the growing Middle Class in its struggles with the
ancient; and in the fate of the hero of the age, Richard Nevile, Earl of
Warwick, popularly called the King-maker, "the greatest as well as the
last of those mighty Barons who formerly overawed the Crown," [Hume
adds, "and rendered the people incapable of civil government,"--a
sentence which, perhaps, judges too hastily the whole question at issue
in our earlier history, between the jealousy of the barons and the
authority of the king.] was involved the very principle of our existing
civilization. It adds to the wide scope of Fiction, which ever loves
to explore the twilight, that, as Hume has truly observed, "No part
of English history since the Conquest is so obscure, so uncertain, so
little authentic or consistent, as that of the Wars between the two
Roses." It adds also to the importance of that conjectural research
in which Fiction may be made so interesting and so useful, that "this
profound darkness falls upon us just on the eve of the restorati