intimate those points of contact in which the private touches the public life of Social Man, so it is well that the Reader should fully understand that all reference to such grand events, as political " crises " and changes of Government, were written many months ago, and have no reference whatever to the actual occurrences of the passing day. Holding it, indeed, a golden maxim that practical politics and ideal art should be kept wholly distinct from each other, and seeking in this Narrative to write that which may be read with unembittered and impartial pleasure by all classes and all parties—nay, perchance, in years to come, by the children of those whom he now addresses—the Author deems it indispensable to such ambition to preserve the neutral ground of imaginative creation, not only free from those personal portraitures which are fatal to comprehensive and typical delineations of character, but from all intentional appeals to an interest which can be but momentary, if given to subjects that best befit the leading articles of political journals. His realm, if it hope to endure, is in the conditions, the humors, the passions by which one general phase of society stands forth in the broad light of our common human nature, never to cast aside, as obsolete and out of fashion, " into the portion of weeds and worn-out faces."
Reader! this exordium is intended, by way of preface to that more important division of this work, in which the one-half the circle rounds itself slowly on to complete the whole. Forgive the exordium; for, rightly considered, it is but an act of deference to thee. Didst thou ever reflect, O Reader! on what thou art to an Author? Art thou aware of the character of dignity and power with which he invests thee? To thee the Author is but an unit in the great sum of intellectual existence. To the Author, thou, O Reader! art the collective representative of a multifarious abiding audience. To thee the Author is but the machine, more or less defective, that throws off a kind of work usually so ephemeral that seldom wilt thou even pause to exam- ine why it please or displease, for a day, the taste that may change with the morrow. But to him, the Author, thou art, O Reader! a confidant and a friend, often nearer and dearer than any one else in the world. All other friends are mortal as himself; they can but survive for a few years the dust he must yield to the grave. But there, in his eye, aloof and aloft forever, stands the Reader, more and more his friend as Time rolls on. 'Tis to thee that he leaves his grandest human bequest, his memory and his name. If secretly he deem himself not appreciated in his own generation, he hugs the belief, often
