A SIMPLETON


By Charles Reade




PREFACE.


It has lately been objected to me, in studiously courteous terms of
course, that I borrow from other books, and am a plagiarist. To this
I reply that I borrow facts from every accessible source, and am not a
plagiarist. The plagiarist is one who borrows from a homogeneous work:
for such a man borrows not ideas only, but their treatment. He who
borrows only from heterogeneous works is not a plagiarist. All fiction,
worth a button, is founded on facts; and it does not matter one straw
whether the facts are taken from personal experience, hearsay, or
printed books; only those books must not be works of fiction.

Ask your common sense why a man writes better fiction at forty than he
can at twenty. It is simply because he has gathered more facts from each
of these three sources,--experience, hearsay, print.

To those who have science enough to appreciate the above distinction,
I am very willing to admit that in all my tales I use a vast deal of
heterogeneous material, which in a life of study I have gathered from
men, journals, blue-books, histories, biographies, law reports, etc. And
if I could, I would gladly specify all the various printed sources to