Eugene Aram/Dedication
Sir,
It has long been the high and cherished hope of my ambition to add my humble tribute to the rich and numberless offerings that have been laid upon the shrine of your genius. At each succeeding Book that I have given to the world, I have paused to consider, if it were worth inscribing with your great name, and at each I have played the procrastinator, and hoped for that morrow of better desert which never came. Having now arrived at a work which closes the series I contemplated from the first, it is possible that this may be the only opportunity afforded me of expressing that high, that just, that affectionate admiration with which you have inspired me in common with all your cotemporaries, and which a French writer has not ungracefully termed "the happiest prerogative of genius." I seize this occasion, then, not as the best, but lest I should lose the last. As a Poet, and as a Novelist, your fame has attained to that height in which praise has become superfluous; but in the character of the writer, there seems to me a yet higher claim to veneration than in that of the writings. The example your genius sets us, who can emulate?—the example your moderation bequeaths to us, who shall forget? It is a great lesson to all cultivators of letters, to behold one who, in winning renown, has at last conquered envy, and who is at once without an equal and without a detractor.
You have left us for a while; but what heart does not, from that very absence, and from its reported cause, follow you to a southern shore, with feelings that make remembrance a duty scarcely less than a delight? What Scotchman can ever forget that you have immortalized his country—or what Englishman that you have bestowed an equal gift upon his language? Whatever the honours that await you abroad, you have left the gratitude, the homage, the very hearts of two mighty Nations to watch over your fame at home.
Yon, I feel assured, will not deem it presumptuous in one, who, to that bright and undying flame which now streams from the grey hills of Scotland,—the last halo with which you have crowned her literary glories,—has turned from his first childhood with a deep and unrelaxing devotion; — you, I feel assured, will not deem it presumptuous in him to inscribe an idle work with your illustrious name : — a work which, how- ever worthless in itself, assumes something of value in his eyes when thus rendered a tribute of respect to you.
London,
December 22, 1831.