The Project Gutenberg EBook of Antonina, by Wilkie Collins

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Antonina

Author: Wilkie Collins

Posting Date: April 21, 2009 [EBook #3606]
Release Date: February 26, 2007
First Posted: June 12, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANTONINA ***

Produced by Bronwyn Margaret Evans. HTML version by Al Haines.

ANTONINA

OR, THE FALL OF ROME

by

WILKIE COLLINS

PREFACE

In preparing to compose a fiction founded on history, the writer of
these pages thought it no necessary requisite of such a work that the
principal characters appearing in it should be drawn from the
historical personages of the period. On the contrary, he felt that
some very weighty objections attached to this plan of composition. He
knew well that it obliged a writer to add largely from invention to
what was actually known--to fill in with the colouring of romantic
fancy the bare outline of historic fact--and thus to place the
novelist's fiction in what he could not but consider most unfavourable
contrast to the historian's truth. He was further by no means
convinced that any story in which historical characters supplied the
main agents, could be preserved in its fit unity of design and
restrained within its due limits of development, without some
falsification or confusion of historical dates--a species of poetical
licence of which he felt no disposition to avail himself, as it was his
main anxiety to make his plot invariably arise and proceed out of the
great events of the era exactly in the order in which they occurred.

Influenced, therefore, by these considerations, he thought that by
forming all his principal characters from imagination, he should be
able to mould them as he pleased to the main necessities of the story;
to display them, without any impropriety, as influenced in whatever
manner appeared most strikingly interesting by its minor incidents; and
further, to make them, on all occasions, without trammel or hindrance,
the practical exponents of the spirit of the age, of all the various
historical illustrations of the period, which the Author's researches
among conflicting b