I beg the favor, if the story is to be
read at all, that no scene may be passed over as extraneous, for
though it begin like a state-paper, or a sermon, it always terminates
by casting some new light on the portrait of the hero. Beyond those
events of peril and of patriotic devotedness, the remainder of the
pages dwell generally with domestic interests; but if the reader do
not approach them regularly through the development of character
opened in the preceding troubled field, what they exhibit will seem a
mere wilderness of incidents, without interest or end; indeed I have
designed nothing in the personages of this narrative out of the way
of living experience. I have sketched no virtue that I have not seen,
nor painted any folly from imagination. I have endeavored to be as
faithful to reality in my pictures of domestic morals, and of heroic
duties, as a just painter would seek to be to the existing objects of
nature, "wonderful and wild, or of gentlest beauty!" and on these
grounds I have steadily attempted to inculcate "that virtue is the
highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of
greatness; that vice is the natural consequence of grovelling
thoughts, which begin in mistake and end in ignominy."
* * * * * * *
POSTCRIPT TO A SUBSEQUENT EDITION.
After so many intervening years have passed since the author of
Thaddeus of Warsaw wrote the foregoing preface, to introduce a work
so novel in its character to the notice and candid judgment of the
British public, it was her intention to take the present occasion of
its now perfectly new republication, at the distance of above forty
years from its earliest appearance and so continued editions, to
express her grateful sense of that public's gratifying sympathies and
honoring testimonies of approbation, from its author's youth to age;
but even in the hour she sits down to perform the gracious task, she
feels a present incapability to undertake it.
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