Damer, now Earl of Dorchester, written a few days after his uncle Lord Sackville's death, and dated September 13th 1785. To that excellent and truly noble person I recommend and devote this short but faithful sketch of his relation's character, conscious how highly he deserved, and how entirely he possessed, the love and the esteem of the deceased. It may to some appear strange that I do not rather address myself to the present lord, the eldest son of his father and the inheritor of his title. He, who knows he has no plea for slighting the friend, who has loved him, knows that he has put it out of my power, and that I must be of all men most insensible, if I did not poignantly feel and feelingly lament his unmerited neglect of me. If the foregoing pages ever meet his eyes, I hope the record of his father's virtues will inspire him to imitate his father's example. I put in my plea for pardon in the very first page of my book with respect to errors in the dates of my disorderly productions. I should have mentioned my comedy of The Impostor, and the publication of my novel of Arundel in two volumes, which I hastily put together whilst I was passing a few idle weeks at Brighthelmstone, where I had no books but such as a circulating novel-shop afforded. I dispatched that work so rapidly, sending it to the press by parcels, of which my first copy was the only one, that I really do not remember what moved me to the undertaking, nor how it came to pass that the cacoëthes scribendi nugas first got hold of me. Be this as it may, I am not about to affect a modesty, which I do not feel, or to seek a shelter from the sin of writing ill, by acknowledging the folly of writing rapidly, for I believe that Arundel has entertained as many readers, and gained as good a character in the world as most heroes of his description, not excepting the immaculate Sir Charles Grandison, in whose company I have never found myself without being puzzled to decide, whether I am most edified by his morality, or disgusted by his pedantry. Arundel perhaps, of all the children, which my brain has given birth to, had the least care and pains bestowed upon his education, yet he is a gentleman, and has been received as such in the first circles, for though he takes the strong side of the question in his argument with Mortlake upon duelling, yet there is hardly one to be found, who thinks with Mortlake, but would be shamed out of society, if he did not act with Arundel. In the character of the Countess of G. I confess I have set virtue · upon ice; she slips, but does not fall; and if I have endowed the young ladies with a degree of sensibility, that might have exposed them to danger, I flatter myself I have taken the proper means of rescuing them from it by marrying them respectively to the men of their hearts. The success however, which by this novel I obtained without labour, determined me to write a second, on which I was resolved to bestow my utmost care and diligence. In this temper of mind I began to form to myself in idea what I conceived should be the model of a perfect novel; having after much deliberation settled and adjusted this to the best of my judgment, I decided for the novel in detail; rejecting the epistolary process, which I had VOL. II. |