hensive reforms-viz., in the courageous facing of the ills
which the mock decorum of timidity would shun to contemplate, but which,
till fairly fronted, in the spirit of practical Christianity, sap daily,
more and more, the walls in which blind Indolence would protect itself
from restless Misery and rampant Hunger. For it is not till Art has told
the unthinking that nothing (rightly treated) is too low for its breath
to vivify and its wings to raise, that the Herd awaken from their
chronic lethargy of contempt, and the Lawgiver is compelled to redress
what the Poet has lifted into esteem. In thus enlarging the boundaries
of the Novelist, from trite and conventional to untrodden ends, I have
seen, not with the jealousy of an author, but with the pride of an
Originator, that I have served as a guide to later and abler writers,
both in England and abroad. If at times, while imitating, they have
mistaken me, I am not. answerable for their errors; or if, more often,
they have improved where they borrowed, I am not envious of their
laurels. They owe me at least this, that I prepared the way for
their reception, and that they would have been less popular and more
misrepresented, if the outcry which bursts upon the first researches
into new directions had not exhausted its noisy vehemence upon me.

In this Novel of Night and Morning I have had various ends in
view--subordinate, I grant, to the higher and more durable morality
which belongs to the Ideal, and instructs us playfully while it
interests, in the passions, and through the heart. First--to deal
fearlessly with that universal unsoundness in social justice which makes
distinctions so marked and iniquitous between Vice and Crime--viz.,
between the corrupting habits and the violent act--which scarce touches
the former with the lightest twig in the fasces--which lifts against
the latter the edge of the Lictor's axe. Let a child steal an apple in
sport, let a starveling steal a roll in despair, and Law conducts them
to the Prison, for evil commune to mellow them for the gibbet. But let
a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice--let him
devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralisation of
his kind--and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called
virtuous, and be served upon its knee, by that Lackey--the Modern World!
I say not that Law can, or that Law should, reach the Vice as it does
the Crime; but I say, that Opinion may be