in
which my imagination revelled the most freely was the analysis of the
private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical
dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive,
and recording the gradually accumulating impulses which led the
personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of
proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.

When I had determined on the main purpose of my story, it was ever my
method to get about me any productions of former authors that seemed to
bear on my subject. I never entertained the fear that in this way of
proceeding I should be in danger of servilely copying my predecessors. I
imagined that I had a vein of thinking that was properly my own, which
would always preserve me from plagiarism. I read other authors, that I
might see what they had done, or, more properly, that I might forcibly
hold my mind and occupy my thoughts in a particular train, I and my
predecessors travelling in some sense to the same goal, at the same time
that I struck out a path of my own, without ultimately heeding the
direction they pursued, and disdaining to inquire whether by any chance
it for a few steps coincided or did not coincide with mine.

Thus, in the instance of "Caleb Williams," I read over a little old
book, entitled "The Adventures of Mademoiselle de St. Phale," a French
Protestant in the times of the fiercest persecution of the Huguenots,
who fled through France in the utmost terror, in the midst of eternal
alarms and hair-breadth escapes, having her quarters perpetually beaten
up, and by scarcely any chance finding a moment's interval of security.
I turned over the pages of a tremendous compilation, entitled "God's
Revenge against Murder," where the beam of the eye of Omniscience was
represented as perpetually pursuing the guilty, and laying open his most
hidden retreats to the light of day. I was extremely conversant with the
"Newgate Calendar" and the "Lives of the Pirates." In the meantime no
works of fiction came amiss to me, provided they were written with
energy. The authors were still employed upon the same mine as myself,
however different was the vein they pursued: we were all of us engaged
in exploring the entrails of mind and motive, and in tracing the various
rencontres and clashes that may occur between man and man in the
diversified scene of human life.

I rather amused myself with tracing a certain similitude between the