“All true reputation begins and ends in the opinions of a man’s intimate friends. He is what they think him, and in the last result will be thought to be so.”—Plain Speaker.
My belief (with certain restrictions and reservations) in the general truth of the above axiom, has impelled me to note down from time to time during my literary life, and tempts me now to give to the world, the Memorials and Recollections which occupy the following pages.
These Memorials offer no Biographical Notices of the persons treated of;
still less do they attempt any critical estimates of their intellectual powers and
pretensions, and the published results of these. They are purely personal. If, therefore, I
have persuaded myself that they are not wholly
| vi | PREFACE, |
My chief motives for allowing these volumes to appear during my lifetime are, the persuasion that the Note-Books, Diaries, and Correspondence from which their materials were composed and selected, include an amount of literary information and personal interest, that would certainly have caused their contents, sooner or later, to see the light in some form or other; and the conviction that, on the one hand, they ought not to do so without my own deliberate preparation and supervision, or, on the other hand, without that personal responsibility which should attend a work of this nature.
|
* “With the exception of that portion of these Memorials which relate to Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his son, each compartment was prepared very shortly after the death of the person to whom it refers. |
| PREFACE. | vii |
A few words seem necessary as to a small portion of the contents of the
following pages. There is a species of literary career (such, for instance, as those of
Scott and Byron),
the details of which are the more interesting and instructive, the more they take the form
of egotisms. There are others (and such has been mine), in regard to which egotism is an
intrusion and an impertinence, except where the exigencies of some particular instance seem
to call for it, with a view to some desirable end, not to be attained by any other means.
The latter will, I sincerely hope, be found to be the case, with respect to whatever matter
of a nature personal to myself has been allowed to find its way into the following pages.
At all events, it has seemed to me that, in wholly excluding such matter, I must
necessarily have suppressed other details, which the reader would not willingly have
missed. If, however, I have, from oversight or inadvertence, fallen into the error in
question (and a studious endeavour to avoid mistakes
| viii | PREFACE, |
With respect to the concluding portion of these Memorials—those relating to Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his son—though avowedly exceptional to the plan of the work, they are certainly not so to its objects. I trust, therefore, that the extraordinary literary interest which must attach to the discovery, now for the first time made public, of the Sheridan Autographs, will at least excuse this sole departure from my self-prescribed course, of treating only of those Deceased Celebrities of whom I could speak from more or less of personal knowledge.
Let me add, finally, that it was in the capacity of a humble student of the Literary Character that I was enabled to gather these Memorials, and in that capacity only I now submit them to the world.
| NEXT ≫ |
