Transcriber's Notes:1. Page scan source:
https://books.google.com/books?id=RKhEAAAAYAAJ
(The University of Virginia).
The Introduction is written by Laurie Magnus, M.A.: the Title-pageis designed by Ivor I. J. Symes.
George Payne Rainsford James, Historiographer Royal to King WilliamIV., was born in London in the first year of the nineteenth century,and died at Venice in 1860. His comparatively short life wasexceptionally full and active. He was historian, politician andtraveller, the reputed author of upwards of a hundred novels, thecompiler and editor of nearly half as many volumes of letters,memoirs, and biographies, a poet and a pamphleteer, and, during thelast ten years of his life, British Consul successively inMassachusetts, Norfolk (Virginia), and Venice. He was on terms offriendship with most of the eminent men of his day. Scott, on whosestyle he founded his own, encouraged him to persevere in his career asa novelist; Washington Irving admired him, and Walter Savage Landorcomposed an epitaph to his memory. He achieved the distinction ofbeing twice burlesqued by Thackeray, and two columns are devoted to anaccount of him in the new "Dictionary of National Biography." Eachgeneration follows its own gods, and G. P. R. James was, perhaps, tooprolific an author to maintain the popularity which made him "in someways the most successful novelist of his time." But his work bearsselection and revival. It possesses the qualities of seriousness andinterest; his best historical novels are faithful in setting and freein movement. His narrative is clear, his history conscientious, andhis plots are well-conceived. English learning and literature areenriched by the work of this writer, who made vivid every epoch in theworld's history by the charm of his romance.
The parodists of G. P. R. James have been quick to remark the samenessof his openings. He has established a kind of 'James-gambit' inhistorical fiction, and the present romance is no exception to therule. Once more the irrepressible horseman is riding along theinevitable road, and once more the first chapter is devoted to acareful description of the traveller's accoutrements--material andmoral. It is not inappropriately, therefore, that James selected ashis motto for this chapter Dryden's conventional lines,
"In this King Arthur's reign,
A lusty knight was pricking o'er the plain."
Donne, Cowley, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Shakespeare, these are the authorsto whom James has chiefly gone for his poetical headings to thechapters of this novel. The feature is a rare one in his works, norcan it truthfully be said that the literary flavour thus imparted ismaintained by the text of the book. There is more familiarity, morebanality, in its style than is common in James's writings. It is odd,for instance, to read the first paragraph of Chapter XVII.--"Oh, theman in the moon! the man in the