For all this I apologize to the public in general, acknowledging that I am neither lawyer nor physician, soldier nor sailor, scholar nor philosopher, nor what the cant of a former day denominated a man of wit about town. Whoever reads the book, will see all this at a glance; but I trust they will also see that I have not drawn from things of marble, but from flesh and blood.
To one portion of his Britannic Majesty's subjects I have particularly to apologize. Since this book went to the press, I have discovered, from Cary's Road-Book, that there is a real village, or hamlet, or town, called Emberton; and I hereby most solemnly declare, that, in fixing upon that name as the scene of my chief adventures, I believed I was employing an entirely fictitious title, and did so for the sole purpose of concealing the real place at which some of the events occurred. Let it be remembered, therefore, by all persons who have seen, heard, or known any thing of the village, town, or hamlet of Emberton, that, in writing this book, I did not know that such a place did truly exist, and that nothing herein contained, is in any way to be understood or construed to apply to the real place called Emberton or its inhabitants, referring solely to a different spot in a different county, which shall, by the reader's good leave, be nameless.
Innerleithen,
25th May, 1833.
DELAWARE;
OR,
THE RUINED FAMILY.
CHAPTER I.
Most cities are hateful; and, without any disposition to "babble about green fields," it must be owned that each is more or less detestable. Nevertheless, amongst them all, there is none to be compared as a whole to London;--none which comprehends within itself, from various causes, so much of the sublime in every sort. Whether we consider its giant immensity of expanse--the wonderful intricacy of its internal structure--the miraculous harmony of its discrepant parts--the grand amalgamation of its different orders, classes, states, pursuits, professions--the mighty aggregate of hopes, wishes, endeavours, joys, successes, fears, pangs, disappointments, crimes, and punishments, that it contains--its relative influence on the world at large--or the vehement pulse with which that "mighty heart" sends the flood of circulation through this beautiful land--we shall find that that most wonderful microcosm well deserves the epithet sublime.
To view it rightly--if we wish to view it with the eye of a philosopher--we should choose perhaps the hour which is chosen by the most magnificent and extraordinary of modern poets, and gaze upon it when the sun is just beginning to pour his first red beams through the dim and loaded air, when that vast desert of brick and mortar, that interminable wilderness of spires and chimneys, looks more wide, and endless, and solemn, than when the eye is distracted by the myriads of mites that creep about it in the risen day.
It may be asked, perhaps, who is there that ever saw it at that hour, except the red-armed housemaid, washing the morning step, and letting in the industrious thief, to steal the greatcoats from the hall; or the dull muffin-man, who goes tinkling his early bell through the misty streets of the wintry morning? Granted, that neither of these--nor the sellers of early purl--nor the venders of saloop and cocoa--nor Covent Garden market-women--nor the late returners from the finish--nor he who starts up from the doorway, where he has passed the wretched night, to recommence the day's career of crime, and danger, and sorrow--can look upon the vast hive in which they dwell with over-refined feelings; and perhaps, to them, may come home unhappy Shelley's forcible line,