"Headlong Hall" was written in 1815; "Nightmare Abbey" in 1817; "Maid
Marian", with the exception of the last three chapters, in 1818;
"Crotchet Castle" in 1830. I am desirous to note the intervals,
because, at each of those periods, things were true, in great matters
and in small, which are true no longer. "Headlong Hall" begins with
the Holyhead Mail, and "Crotchet Castle" ends with a rotten borough.
The Holyhead mail no longer keeps the same hours, nor stops at the
Capel Cerig Inn, which the progress of improvement has thrown out of
the road; and the rotten boroughs of 1830 have ceased to exist, though
there are some very pretty pocket properties, which are their worthy
successors. But the classes of tastes, feelings, and opinions, which
were successively brought into play in these little tales, remain
substantially the same. Perfectibilians, deteriorationists,
statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political
economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid
visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the
picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march for
ever, _pari passu_ with the march of mechanics, which some facetiously
call the march of the intellect. The fastidious in old wine are a race
that does not decay. Literary violators of the confidences of private
life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an unenviable notoriety.
Match-makers from interest, and the disappointed in love and in
friendship, are varieties of which specimens are extant. The great
principle of the Right of Might is as flourishing now as in the days
of Maid Marian: the array of false pretensions, moral, political, and
literary, is as imposing as ever: the rulers of the world still feel
things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes: and
political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums
and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude: following,