These sketches, however, are no more than what any man who has lived long, and not shut his eyes, must have marked as well as myself. But as it is not everybody that has lived long, or that takes the trouble of opening his eyes-or, if he does, of committing to memory what he has seen-the endeavour to do this may be thought not unuseful to those who would rather read, than observe. How this has been executed, is a very different, and, to me, a very fearful question. In fact, it is with apprehension that I again encounter the world's eye. The success of Tremaine' and 'De Vere,' (for, without disputing the various criticisms that were made upon them, I may venture to say they were successful,) has made any new attempt at public notice, on my part, hazardous, and perhaps impolitic.

I ought to have set before me the Just sentiments (by the by, not the practice) of the charming author of a most charming Romance :-" Je résolus en effet de me tenir là, et ne pas risquer,

par une seconde publication, de détruire l'espèce de prestige qui sembloit attaché à la première. Il ne faut pas fatiguer le bonheur, il échappe si facilement !*"

Why, then, I have not yielded to this prudent advice, is a question which I do not feel it very comfortable to answer; for f was not even

obliged by hunger," or "request of friends." It is, indeed, true that abundant leisure after a busy life, and the necessity of seeking a diversion of thought from reflections prompted by long and severe illness, and still more severe domestic calamities, may be deemed a fair excuse for committing these ebullitions to paper; but the excuse stops here, and will not justify the sending them into the world. Let me then fairly confess (whatever may be said of the vanity of the confession,) that the hope that the experience and observation of a long life might afford something useful, if not amusing, to those who may come after me, has been the deciding cause of the present publication.

* Mad. de Montolieu, Preface to Caroline.

It will be seen that I have again chosen the didactic style of composition-more purely didactic than before. I have not here even attempted a story, as I did in my two former productions. The characters introduced are merely instruments to convey the sentiments and opinions which form the subject of the work. They cannot therefore pretend to inspire more interest than what the investigations themselves may create. I am sensible of the disadvantage of such a plan; for though I have been laughed at for saying I was no novelist in writing Tremaine, it is but true that my original design in that work, was solely and drily the Treatise on Natural Religion which almost fills the third volume. I chose the dialogistic form merely as most convenient to the argument; and so confined to it was the plan, that there was not even a name to the speakers, who were originally and literally A. and B. This, however, looked so meagre, that I gave them two names, Evelyn and Tremaine, but still left them without characters or story. This was very little less bald; so I added a sort of charac

ter, and by degrees a sort of story, which again, in creating something like interest, I enlarged by the addition of a heroine, and of course a love-tale. Nevertheless the primary scope and intention of the work was nowhere departed from; I continued, all through, a mere moralist, and never either intended or pretended to be more. My heroine. herself, whom I have the melancholy delight of thinking the world has been pleased with, was close at my elbow; so that I have not a claim to the gift of imagination, even in that.

It was almost the same in De Vere. I wished indeed to paint a Constance, but more to portray a Mowbray, a Cleveland, a Wentworth, and a Flowerdale. De Vere himself was secondary to these; the diseases of ambition were my chief, and at first my only, objects. Nowhere, therefore, have I claim to the distinction (in the present day, a considerable one,) of being thought a novelist, much less a popular one. Whatever the lore I have presented, it is didactic; and, in the present