ctures are fair, worthy, and hearty,
you _must_ see it in the reading; but if they are forced and hard, no
amount of kindness can make you feel their truth, as I want them felt.

I make no self-praise out of this: if feeling has been honestly set
down, it is only in virtue of a native impulse, over which I have
altogether too little control, but if it is set down badly, I have
wronged Nature, and (as Nature is kind) I have wronged myself.

A great many inquisitive people will, I do not doubt, be asking, after
all this prelude, if my pictures are true pictures? The question--the
courteous reader will allow me to say--is an impertinent one. It is but
a shabby truth that wants an author's affidavit to make it trustworthy.
I shall not help my story by any such poor support. If there are not
enough elements of truth, honesty, and nature in my pictures to make
them believed, they shall have no oath of mine to bolster them up.

I have been a sufferer in this way before now; and a little book that I
had the whim to publish a year since, has been set down by many as an
arrant piece of imposture. Claiming sympathy as a Bachelor, I have been
recklessly set down as a cold, undeserving man of family! My story of
troubles and loves has been sneered at as the sheerest gammon.

But among this crowd of cold-blooded critics, it was pleasant to hear of
one or two pursy old fellows who railed at me for winning the affections
of a sweet Italian girl, and then leaving her to pine in discontent! Yet
in the face of this, an old companion of mine in Rome, with whom I
accidentally met the other day, wondered how on earth I could have made
so tempting a story out of the matronly and black-haired spinster with
whom I happened to be quartered in the Eternal City!

I shall leave my critics to settle such differences between themselves;
and consider it far better to bear with slanders from both sides of the
house, than to bewray the pretty tenderness of the pursy old gentlemen,
or to cast a doubt upon the practical testimony of my quondam companion.
Both give me high and judicious compliment,--all the more grateful
because only half deserved. For I never yet was conscious--alas, that
the confession should be forced from me!--of winning the heart of any
maiden, whether native or Italian; and as for such delicacy of
imagination as to work up a lovely damsel out of the withered remnant
that forty odd years of Italian life can spare, I can assure my