from the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, in Perrault's Tales of Ma Mere L'Oie. I supposed a hero who should have this faculty, or this infirmity, of falling asleep unexpectedly, and should sleep twenty, thirty, or a hundred years at a time, at the pleasure of myself, his creator. I knew that such a canvas would naturally admit a vast variety of figures, actions, and surprises.

When my respectable friend, the publisher of the present work, found means to put in activity the suspended faculty of fiction within me, I resolved. to return to the tale which, eight years before, I had laid aside. But the nearer I looked at it, the more I was frightened at the task. Such a work must be made up of a variety of successive tales, having for their main point of connection, the impression which the

sonage.

events brought forward should produce on my sleeping-waking principal perI should therefore have had at least a dozen times to set myself to the task of invention, as it were, de novo. I judged it more prudent, particularly regarding certain disadvantages under which I found myself, to choose a story that should be more strictly one, and should so have a greater degree of momentum, tending to carry me forward, after the first impulse given, by one incessant motion, from the commencement to the conclusion. Such was my motive for rejecting my former subject, and adopting that which is here treated.

Every author, at least for the last two thousand years, takes his hint from some suggestion afforded by an author that has gone before him, as Sterne has

very humorously observed; and I do not pretend to be an exception to this rule. The impression, that first led me to look with an eye of favour upon the subject here treated, was derived from a story-book, called Wieland, written by a person, certainly of distinguished genius, who I believe was born and died in the province of Pennsylvania in the United States of North America, and who calls himself C. B. Brown. This impression was further improved from some hints in De Montfort, a tragedy, by Joanna Baillie. Having signed these bills against me, I hold myself for the present occasion discharged from all claims of my literary creditors, except such as are purely transient and incidental.

* Tristram Shandy, Vol. I. chap. xxi. Edition 1775.

any

To proceed in the same style of confession and unreserve. I am not aware that, in my capacity as an author, I owe considerable thanks to the kindness of my contemporaries; yet I part from them without the slightest tinge of illhumour. If ever they have received my productions with welcome, it has been because the same public impression, or the same tone of moral feeling, had been previously generated in the minds of a considerable portion of my species, and in my own. When I have written merely from a private sentiment, and thought to try whether, as Marmontel says, they valued me for myself, [which I did in the Essay on Sepulchres, and the Lives of the Nephews of Milton] my reception has been such, as might be well calculated to cure me, if I had been constitutionally liable to the in

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toxications of vanity. Yet I have never truckled to the world. I have never published any thing with the slightest purpose to take advantage of the caprice of the day, to approach the public on its weak side, or to pamper its frailties. What I have produced, was written merely in obedience to that spirit, unshackled and independent, whatever were its other qualities, that commanded me to take up my pen."

There are two or three things, which I still meditate to perform in my character of an author. But whether life, and health, and leisure will be granted me sufficient for the execution of what I design, is among the secrets of " time not yet in existence." In either event I feel myself altogether satisfied and resigned.