My dear Sir:—
In dedicating to you the following pages, I am moved not more by private friendship and regard, than by esteem for your abilities, and respect for your many and varied acquirements. It might seem somewhat presumptuous in me to call for your acceptance or seek your approbation of this work, when not only your general acquaintance with, but your profound knowledge of, almost every branch of modern and ancient literature qualify and might be expected to prompt you to minute and severe criticism. But I have always found, in regard to my own works at least, that those who were best fitted to judge were the most inclined to be lenient, and that men of high talent and deep learning condescended to tolerate, if not to approve, that which was assailed by very small critics, or scoffed at by men who, calling themselves humorists, omitted the word "bad" before the appellation in which they gloried.
To your good humor, then, I leave the work, and will only add a few words in regard to the object and construction of the story.
We have in the present day romances of many various kinds; and I really know not how to class my present effort. It is not a love-story, for any thing like that which was the great moving power of young energies—at least in less material days than these—has very little part in the book. I cannot call it a novel without a hero, because it is altogether dedicated to the adventures of one man. I cannot call it a romance without a heroine, because there is a woman in it, and a woman with whom I am myself very much in love. I cannot call it absolutely a historical romance, because there are several characters which are not historical, and I am afraid I have taken a few little liberties with Chronology which, were she as prudish a dame as some of the middle-aged ladies whom I could mention, would either earn me a box of the ear, or produce so much scandal that my good name would be lost forever. Plague take the months and the days! they are always getting in one's way. But I do believe I have been very reverent and respectful to their grandmothers the years, and, with due regard for precedence and the Court Guide, have not put any of the latter out of her proper place.
I do not altogether wish to call this a book of character; for I do not exactly understand that word as the public has lately been taught to understand it. There is no peasant, or cobbler, or brick-layer's apprentice, in the whole book, endowed with superhuman qualities, moral and physical. There is no personage in high station—given as the type of a class—imbued with intense selfishness or demoniac passions, wicked without motive, heartless against common sense, and utterly degraded from that noble humanity, God's best and holiest gift to mankind. There is no meek, poor, puling, suffering lover, who condescends humbly to be bamboozled and befooled through three volumes, or Heaven knows how many numbers, for the sake of marrying the heroine in the end. I therefore cannot properly, in the present day, call it a work of character.
I might call it, perhaps,—although the hero is an Englishman,—a picture of the times of Louis XIII; but, alas! I have not ventured to give a full picture of these times. We have become so uncommonly cleanly and decorous in our own days, that a mere allusion to the dirt and indecency of the age of our great-grandmothers is not to be tolerated. In order, indeed, to preserve something like verisimilitude, I have been obliged to glance, in one chapter, at the freedom of manners of the days to which I refer; but it has been a mere glance, and given in such a manner that the cheek of one who understands it, in the sense in which one of those very days would understand it, must have lost the power of blushing. At all events, it can never sully or offend the pure, nor lead the impure any further wrong.
There are a great many explanations and comments, in illustration of the times, which I should like to give for the benefit of that part of my readers who have put on the right of knowing all things at the same time that the third change was made in their dress, and I would have done so, in notes; but, unfortunately, I do not write Greek; and a little incident prevented me from writing those notes in Latin. A work—a most interesting work—was published a few years ago in London, called the Bernstein Hexe, or Amber Witch. More than one translation appeared; and one of these had the original notes,—some written in Latin where they were peculiarly anatomical and indecent; but, to my surprise, I found that several ladies were fully versed in that sort of Latinity. I cannot flatter myself with having a sufficient command of the Roman tongue to be enabled to veil the meaning more completely from the unlearned.
Only in the case of two personages have I attempted to elaborate character,—in regard to my hero, and in regard to the Cardinal de Richelieu. The former, though not altogether fictitious, must go with very little comment. I wished to show how a young heart may be hardened by circumstances, and how it may be softened and its better feelings evolved by a propitious change. The latter, I will confess, I have labored much; because I think the world in general, and I myself also, have done some injustice to one of the greatest men that ever lived. Very early in life I depicted him when he had reached old age,—that is to say, his old age; for he had not, at the time of his death, numbered as many years as are now upon my own head. He had then been tried in the fire of the most terrible circumstances which perhaps ever assayed a human heart; not only tried, but hardened; and even then, upon his death-bed, his burst of tenderness to his old friend, Bois Robert, his delight in the arts, and passion for flowers, showed that the tenderer and—may I not say more noble?—feelings of the man had not been swallowed up by the hard duties of the statesman, or the galling cares of the politician. I now present him to the reader at a much earlier period of life,—young, vigorous, successful, happy,—when the germs of all those qualities for which men have reproached or applauded him were certainly developed, were growing to maturity; when the severity which afterwards characterized him, and the gentleness which he as certainly displayed, had both been exercised; but when the briers and thorns had not fully grown up, and before the soft grass of the heart had been trampled under foot.
All men have mixed characters. I do not believe in perfect evil or in perfect goodness on this earth; but at various times of life the worse or the better spirit predominates, according to the nourishment and encouragement it receives. How far Richelieu changed, and when and how he changed, would require a longer discussion than can be here afforded. But one thing is to be always remembered,—that he was generally painted by his enemies; and, where they admit high qualities and generous feelings, we may be sure that it was done with even a niggard hand, and add something to the tribute of the unwilling witness.