author of established reputation in the selection of early compositions
for subsequent republication, are obviously inapplicable to the
preparation of a posthumous standard edition of his collected works.
Those who read the tale of "Falkland" eight-and-forty years ago' have
long survived the age when character is influenced by the literature of
sentiment. The readers to whom it is now presented are not Lord Lytton's
contemporaries; they are his posterity. To them his works have already
become classical. It is only upon the minds of the young that the works
of sentiment have any appreciable moral influence. But the sentiment of
each age is peculiar to itself; and the purely moral influence of
sentimental fiction seldom survives the age to which it was first
addressed. The youngest and most impressionable reader of such works as
the "Nouvelle Hemise," "Werther," "The Robbers," "Corinne," or "Rene," is
not now likely to be morally influenced, for good or ill, by the
perusal of those masterpieces of genius. Had Byron attained the age at
which great authors most realise the responsibilities of fame and genius,
he might possibly have regretted, and endeavoured to suppress, the
publication of "Don Juan;" but the possession of that immortal poem is an
unmixed benefit to posterity, and the loss of it would have been an
irreparable misfortune.

"Falkland," although the earliest, is one of the most carefully finished
of its author's compositions. All that was once turbid, heating,
unwholesome in the current of sentiment which flows through this history
of a guilty passion, "Death's immortalising winter" has chilled and
purified. The book is now a harmless, and, it may be hoped, a not
uninteresting, evidence of the precocity of its author's genius. As
such, it is here reprinted.

[It was published in 1827]