imperial fiction which
invents the Probable where it discards the Real. The mode I have adopted
has perhaps only this merit, that it is my own--mine by discovery and
mine by labour. And if I can raise not the spirits that obeyed the great
master of romance, nor gain the key to the fairyland that opened to his
spell,--at least I have not rifled the tomb of the wizard to steal my art
from the book that lies clasped on his breast.

In treating of an age with which the general reader is so unfamiliar as
that preceding the Norman Conquest, it is impossible to avoid (especially
in the earlier portions of my tale) those explanations of the very
character of the time which would have been unnecessary if I had only
sought in History the picturesque accompaniments to Romance. I have to do
more than present an amusing picture of national manners--detail the
dress, and describe the banquet. According to the plan I adopt, I have
to make the reader acquainted with the imperfect fusion of races in Saxon
England, familiarise him with the contests of parties and the ambition of
chiefs, show him the strength and the weakness of a kindly but ignorant
church; of a brave but turbulent aristocracy; of a people partially free,
and naturally energetic, but disunited by successive immigrations, and
having lost much of the proud jealousies of national liberty by
submission to the preceding conquests of the Dane; acquiescent in the
sway of foreign kings, and with that bulwark against invasion which an
hereditary order of aristocracy usually erects, loosened to its very
foundations by the copious admixture of foreign nobles. I have to
present to the reader, here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate
monk, there, the dark superstition that still consulted the deities of
the North by runes on the elm bark and adjurations of the dead. And in
contrast to those pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I
have to bring forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the
coming conquerors,--the stern will and deep guile of the Norman
chief--the comparative knowledge of the rising Norman Church--the nascent
spirit of chivalry in the Norman vavasours; a spirit destined to
emancipate the very people it contributed to enslave, associated, as it
imperfectly was, with the sense of freedom: disdainful, it is true, of
the villein, but proudly curbing, though into feudal limits, the
domination of the liege. In a word, I must place fully