urderess, called Mrs. Armytage. The Press concurred in protesting that
the character in question was untrue to nature, and, indeed, wholly
impossible. Some details I had given of her violent conduct in prison
were specially objected to as grossly improbable. I said at the time
that I had drawn the woman from nature, and I was sneered at, and not
believed. I now again declare, upon my honour, that this Mrs. Armytage,
was a compound of two real people; that as regards her murdering
propensities, I was, for the matter and the manner thereof, beholden to
the French _Gazette des Tribunaux_ for the year 1839; and that as
respects her achievements in the way of lying, thieving, swindling,
forging, and fascinating, I had before me, as a model, a woman whose
misdeeds were partially exposed some ten years since in _Household
Words_, who, her term of punishment over, is, to the best of my belief,
alive at this moment, _and who was re-married less than a year
ago_:--the announcement of that fact being duly inserted in the _Times_
newspaper. The prison details had been gathered by me years before, in
visits to gaols and in conversations with the governors thereof; and
months after the publication of the "Seven Sons of Mammon," I found them
corroborated in their minutest characteristics in a remarkable work
called "Female Life in Prison."

It remains for me to say one word as to the language in which the
"Adventures of Captain Dangerous" are narrated. I had originally
intended to call it a "Narrative in plain English;" but I found, as I
proceeded, that the study of early eighteenth century literature--I mean
the ante-Johnsonian period--had led me into the use of very many now
obsolete words and phrases, which sounded like anything but plain
English. Let me, however, humbly represent that the style, such as it
is, was not adopted without a purpose, and that the English I have
called "old-fashioned," was not in the remotest degree intended to be
modelled upon the diction of Swift, or Pope, or Addison, or Steele, or
Dryden, or Defoe, or even Nash or Howel. Such a feat of elegant pedantry
has already been accomplished by Mr. Thackeray in his noble story of
_Esmond_; and I had no wish to follow up a dignified imitation by a
sorry caricature. I simply endeavoured to make Captain Dangerous express
himself as a man of ordinary intelligence and capacity would do who was
born in the reign of Queen Anne,--who received a scrambling education in