nce and action throughout the struggle by
those Continental writers who had dealt imaginatively with Napoleon's
career, seemed always to leave room for a new handling of the theme
which should re-embody the features of this influence in their true
proportion; and accordingly, on a belated day about six years back,
the following drama was outlined, to be taken up now and then at wide
intervals ever since.

It may, I think, claim at least a tolerable fidelity to the facts of
its date as they are give in ordinary records. Whenever any evidence
of the words really spoken or written by the characters in their
various situations was attainable, as close a paraphrase has been
aimed at as was compatible with the form chosen. And in all cases
outside the oral tradition, accessible scenery, and existing relics,
my indebtedness for detail to the abundant pages of the historian,
the biographer, and the journalist, English and Foreign, has been,
of course, continuous.

It was thought proper to introduce, as supernatural spectators
of the terrestrial action, certain impersonated abstractions, or
Intelligences, called Spirits. They are intended to be taken by the
reader for what they may be worth as contrivances of the fancy merely.
Their doctrines are but tentative, and are advanced with little eye
to a systematized philosophy warranted to lift "the burthen of the
mystery" of this unintelligible world. The chief thing hoped for
them is that they and their utterances may have dramatic plausibility
enough to procure for them, in the words of Coleridge, "that willing
suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic
faith." The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe
forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine
personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or
channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial
machinery of, say, _Paradise Lost_, as peremptorily as that of the
_Iliad_ or the _Eddas_. And the abandonment of the masculine pronoun
in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary
and logical consequence of the long abandonment by thinkers of the
anthropomorphic conception of the same.

These phantasmal Intelligences are divided into groups, of which one
only, that of the Pities, approximates to "the Universal Sympathy of
human nature--the spectator idealized"[1] of the Greek Chorus; it is
impressionable and inconsistent in it