ould defeat or baffle, and with extraordinary resources of
intellect. Nor could my purpose of giving an overpowering interest to my
tale be answered without his appearing to have been originally endowed
with a mighty store of amiable dispositions and virtues, so that his
being driven to the first act of murder should be judged worthy of the
deepest regret, and should be seen in some measure to have arisen out of
his virtues themselves. It was necessary to make him, so to speak, the
tenant of an atmosphere of romance, so that every reader should feel
prompted almost to worship him for his high qualities. Here were ample
materials for a first volume.

I felt that I had a great advantage in thus carrying back my invention
from the ultimate conclusion to the first commencement of the train of
adventures upon which I purposed to employ my pen. An entire unity of
plot would be the infallible result; and the unity of spirit and
interest in a tale truly considered gives it a powerful hold on the
reader, which can scarcely be generated with equal success in any other
way.

I devoted about two or three weeks to the imagining and putting down
hints for my story before I engaged seriously and methodically in its
composition. In these hints I began with my third volume, then proceeded
to my second, and last of all grappled with the first. I filled two or
three sheets of demy writing-paper, folded in octavo, with these
memorandums. They were put down with great brevity, yet explicitly
enough to secure a perfect recollection of their meaning, within the
time necessary for drawing out the story at full, in short paragraphs of
two, three, four, five, or six lines each.

I then sat down to write my story from the beginning. I wrote for the
most part but a short portion in any single day. I wrote only when the
afflatus was upon me. I held it for a maxim that any portion that was
written when I was not fully in the vein told for considerably worse
than nothing. Idleness was a thousand times better in this case than
industry against the grain. Idleness was only time lost; and the next
day, it may be, was as promising as ever. It was merely a day perished
from the calendar. But a passage written feebly, flatly, and in a wrong
spirit, constituted an obstacle that it was next to impossible to
correct and set right again. I wrote therefore by starts; sometimes for
a week or ten days not a line. Yet all came to the same thing in the
sequel. O