In the work that I now offer to the public, from former experience of misinterpration, I have been more scrupulously cautious to guard against any possibility of individual application. In the former novel, I merely took care not to copy a fool, a coxcomb, a debauchee, or a knave, or any other character of a ridiculous or bad kind, from any persons known to me for these qualifications. Still, however, from inadvertence, I did take a feature or two here and there, that I grieve to acknowledge, on perusing the picture after it was finished, struck me with a likeness in some lineament. In the present novel, I have been much more vigilantly cautious. I not only have not copied fools, &c. from persons known to me to be such, but in drawing any character of that or the other equivalent classes, I have carefully run my memory over the individuals that I know
