It is possible, nevertheless, that many persons may cry out that what I have written of Captain Dangerous could not have occurred, with any reasonable amount of probability, to any one man. Let me mention the names of a score of men and women recently or still living, and let me ask the reader whether anything in my hero's career was stranger than the adventures which marked theirs? Here is a penful taken at random,—Lord Dundonald, Lola Montes, Raousset-Boulbon, Richard Burton, Garibaldi, Felice Orsini, Ida Pfeiffer, Edgar Poe, Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson (the Siberian travellers), Marshal St. Arnaud, Paul du Chaillu, Joseph Wolff, Dr. Livingstone, Gordon Cumming, William Howard Russell, Robert Houdin, Constantine Simonides, Barnum, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. The life of any one of these personages, truthfully written, would be a thousand times stranger than anything that is set down to Dangerous's account. Let me quote one little example more in point. Two years ago I wrote a story called the "Seven Sons of Mammon," in which there was an ideal character—that of a fair-haired-little swindler, and presumable murderess, called Mrs. Armytage. The Press concurred in protesting that the character in question was untrue to nature, and, indeed, wholly impossible. Some details I had given of her violent conduct in prison were specially objected to as grossly improbable. I said at the time that I had drawn the woman from nature, and I was sneered at, and not believed. I now again declare, upon my honour, that this Mrs. Armytage, was a compound of two real people; that as regards her murdering propensities, I was, for the matter and the manner thereof, beholden to the French Gazette des Tribunaux for the year 1839; and that as respects her achievements in the way of lying, thieving, swindling, forging, and fascinating, I had before me, as a model, a woman whose misdeeds were partially exposed some ten years since in Household Words, who, her term of punishment over, is, to the best of my belief, alive at this moment, and who was re-married less than a year ago:—the announcement of that fact being duly inserted in the Times newspaper. The prison details had been gathered by me years before, in visits to gaols and in conversations with the governors thereof; and months after the publication of the "Seven Sons of Mammon," I found them corroborated in their minutest characteristics in a remarkable work called "Female Life in Prison."

It remains for me to say one word as to the language in which the "Adventures of Captain Dangerous" are narrated. I had originally intended to call it a "Narrative in plain English;" but I found, as I proceeded, that the study of early eighteenth century literature—I mean the ante-Johnsonian period—had led me into the use of very many now obsolete words and phrases, which sounded like anything but plain English. Let me, however, humbly represent that the style, such as it is, was not adopted without a purpose, and that the English I have called "old-fashioned," was not in the remotest degree intended to be modelled upon the diction of Swift, or Pope, or Addison, or Steele, or Dryden, or Defoe, or even Nash or Howel. Such a feat of elegant pedantry has already been accomplished by Mr. Thackeray in his noble story of Esmond; and I had no wish to follow up a dignified imitation by a sorry caricature. I simply endeavoured to make Captain Dangerous express himself as a man of ordinary intelligence and capacity would do who was born in the reign of Queen Anne,—who received a scrambling education in that of George the First,—who had passed the prime of his life abroad and had picked up a good many bastard foreign words and locutions,—whose reading had been confined to the ordinary newspapers and chap-books of his time (with perhaps an occasional dip into the pages of "Ned Ward" and "Tom Brown"),—and who in his old age had preserved the pseudo-didactic of his youth. The "Adventures of Captain Dangerous" have been, in every sense, an experiment, and not a very gratifying one. I have earned by them a great many kicks, but a very few halfpence. Should the toe of any friendly critic be quivering in his boot just now, at the bare announcement of "Captain Dangerous'" re-appearance, I would respectfully submit that there could not possibly occur a better opportunity than the present for kicking me de novo, as I have been for months very ill, and am weary, and broken.

George Augustus Sala.

Bernard Street, Russell Square,
April, 1863.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

PAGE
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
MINE OWN HOUSE[1]

CHAPTER THE SECOND.
THE HISTORY OF AN UNKNOWN LADY, WHO CAME FROM DOVER IN A COACH-AND-SIX[22]

CHAPTER THE THIRD.
THE HISTORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER, WHO WAS A LADY OF CONSEQUENCE IN THE WEST COUNTRY[40]

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.
MY GRANDMOTHER DIES, AND I AM LEFT ALONE, WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A NAME[87]

CHAPTER THE FIFTH.
I AM BARBAROUSLY ABUSED BY THOSE WHO HAVE CHARGE OF ME, AND FLYING INTO CHARLWOOD CHASE, JOIN THE "BLACKS"[126]

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.
THE HISTORY OF MY GRANDFATHER, WHO WAS SO LONG KEPT A PRISONER IN ONE OF THE KING'S CASTLES IN THE EAST COUNTRY[148]

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.
I AM BRED UP IN VERY BAD COMPANY, AND (TO MY SHAME) HELP TO KILL THE KING'S DEER[181]

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.
THE HISTORY OF MOTHER DRUM[220]

CHAPTER THE NINTH.
THE END OF MY ADVENTURES AMONG THE BLACKS[247]

CHAPTER THE TENTH.
I AM VERY NEAR BEING HANGED[283]