take you
by the buttonhole in confidence and make fun of my Art--it has been
my chief effort to draw the characters with a vigour and breadth of
treatment, derived from the nearest and truest view that I could get of
the one model, Nature. Whether I shall at once succeed in adding to
the circle of your friends in the world of fiction--or whether you will
hurry through the narrative, and only discover on a later reading that
it is the characters which have interested you in the story--remains to
be seen. Either way, your sympathy will find me grateful; for, either
way, my motive has been to please you.

During its periodical publication correspondents, noting certain
passages in "Heart and Science," inquired how I came to think of writing
this book. The question may be readily answered in better words than
mine. My book has been written in harmony with opinions which have an
indisputable claim to respect. Let them speak for themselves.

SHAKESPEARE'S OPINION.--"It was always yet the trick of our
English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common."
_(King Henry IV., Part II.)_

WALTER SCOTT'S OPINION--"I am no great believer in the extreme
degree of improvement to be derived from the advancement of Science; for
every study of that nature tends, when pushed to a certain extent, to
harden the heart." _(Letter to Miss Edgeworth.)_

FARADAY'S OPINION.--"The education of the judgment has for its
first and its last step--Humility." _(Lecture on Mental Education, at
the Royal Institution.)_

Having given my reasons for writing the book, let me conclude by telling
you what I have kept out of the book.

It encourages me to think that we have many sympathies in common; and
among them, that most of us have taken to our hearts domestic pets.
Writing under this conviction, I have not forgotten my responsibility
towards you, and towards my Art, in pleading the cause of the harmless
and affectionate beings of God's creation. From first to last, you are
purposely left in ignorance of the hideous secrets of Vivisection. The
outside of the laboratory is a necessary object in my landscape--but I
never once open the door and invite you to look in. I trace, in one of
my characters, the result of the habitual practice of cruelty (no matter
under what pretence) in fatally deteriorating the nature of man--and
I leave the picture to speak for itself. My own personal feeling has
throughout been held in check.