should bring to his task a tender heart and a delicate and gentle hand.

Thus, in preparing an introductory chapter for these pages which are to
follow, many and various thoughts suggest themselves, and it is
necessary to recognize and pursue them with gentleness and caution.

The romance of "Eliza Wharton" appeared in print not many years
subsequent to the assumed transactions it so faithfully attempts to
record. Written as it was by one highly educated for the times,--the
popular wife of a popular clergyman, connected in no distant degree, by
marriage, with the family of the heroine, and one who by the very
profession and position of her husband was, as by necessity, brought
into the sphere of actual intercourse with the principal characters of
the novel, and as the book also took precedence in time of all American
romances, when, too, the literature of the day was any thing but
"_light_"--it is not surprising that it thus took precedence in interest
as well of all American novels, at least throughout New England, and was
found, in every cottage within its borders, beside the family Bible, and
though pitifully, yet almost as carefully treasured.

Since that time it has run through a score of editions, at long
intervals out of print, and again revived at the public call with an
eagerness of distribution which few modern romances have enjoyed. Its
author, Hannah Foster, was the daughter of Grant Webster, a well-known
merchant of Boston, and wife of Rev. John Foster, of Brighton,
Massachusetts, whose pedigree, but few removes backward in the line of
her husband,[A] interlinked, as has been already hinted, with that of
the "Coquette." Thus did they hold towards each other that very
significant relationship--especially in the past century--of "_cousins_"
a relationship better heeded and more earnestly recognized and