Page:Paul Clifford Vol 1.djvu/24

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xviii
DEDICATORY EPISTLE.

—of giving descriptive and appropriate dialogue to classes of society, far more capable of yielding interest or amusement to persons of any mental vigour, whatever be their rank, than trite copies of the languid inanities of a drawing-room, or lifeless portraits of originals, whose very boast it is to be scarcely alive.[1]

For any occasional retaliation on critics, enemies, or Scotchmen—(with me, for the most part, they

  1. In some inimical, and rather personal but clever observations, made on me in a new periodical work, it is implied that people living in good society cannot write philosophically, or, it would seem, even well. I suppose of course the critic speaks of persons who live only in good society; and though the remark is not true, as it happens, singularly enough, that the best and most philosophical prose writers, in England especially, have been gentlemen, and lived for the most part, as a matter of course, among their equals, yet I shall content myself with saying, that the remark, true or false, in this case by no means applies to me, who have seen quite as much of the lowest orders as of any other, and who scarcely ever go into what is termed 'the world.' By the way, the Critic alluded to having been pleased in a very pointed manner to consider me the hero as well as author of my own book (Pelham), I am induced to say a few words on the subject. The year before Pelham appeared, I published "Falkland," in which the hero was essentially of the gloomy, romantic, cloud-like order; in short, Sir Reginald Glanville out-Glanvilled. The matter-of-fact gentry, who say "We," and call themselves Critics, declared that "Falkland" was evidently a personation of the author: next year out came "Pelham,"—the moral antipodes of "Falkland,"—and the same gentry said exactly the same thing of "Pelham." Will they condescend to reconcile this contradiction? The fact is, that the moment any prominency, any corporeal reality is given to a hero, and the hero (mark this) is not made ostentatiously good,—(nobody said I was like Mordaunt)—then the hero and the Author are the same person!