After so many intervening years have passed since the author of
Thaddeus of Warsaw wrote the foregoing preface, to introduce a work
so novel in its character to the notice and candid judgment of the
British public, it was her intention to take the present occasion of
its now perfectly new republication, at the distance of above forty
years from its earliest appearance and so continued editions, to
express her grateful sense of that public's gratifying sympathies and
honoring testimonies of approbation, from its author's youth to age;
but even in the hour she sits down to perform the gracious task, she
feels a present incapability to undertake it. The very attempt has
too sensibly recalled to her heart events that have befallen her
since she lived amongst the models of her tale; and she has also more
recently been in many of the places it describes; and circumstances,
both of joys and sorrows, having occurred to her there to influence
the whole future current of her mortal life, she finds it impossible
to yet touch on those times and scenes connected with the subjects of
her happy youth, which would now only reverberate notes of sadness it
is her duty to repress. Hence, though while revising the work itself
she experiences a calm delight in the occupation, being a kind of
parting duty, also, to the descendants of her earliest, readers, she
would rather defer any little elucidations she may have met with
regarding the objects of her pen to a few pages in the form of an
Appendix at the end of the work; all, indeed, bringing her
observations, whether by weal or woe, to the one great and guiding
conclusion. "Man is formed for two states of existence--a mortal and
an immortal being;" in the Holy Scriptures authoritatively declared,
"For the life that now is, and for that which is to come."

JANE PORTER.