LITTLE MEMOIRS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY GEORGE PASTON


1902



PREFACE

_For these sketches of minor celebrities of the nineteenth century,
it has been my aim to choose subjects whose experiences seem to
illustrate the life--more especially the literary and artistic
life--of the first half of the century; and who of late years, at any
rate, have not been overwhelmed by the attentions of the minor
biographer. Having some faith in the theory that the verdict of
foreigners is equivalent to that of contemporary posterity, I have
included two aliens in the group. A visitor to our shores, whether he
be a German princeling like Pueckler-Muskau, or a gilded democrat like
N. P. Willis, may be expected to observe and comment upon many traits
of national life and manners that would escape the notice of a native
chronicler.

Whereas certain readers of a former volume--'Little Memoirs of the
Eighteenth Century'--seem to have been distressed by the fact that the
majority of the characters died in the nineteenth century, it is
perhaps meet that I should apologise for the chronology of this
present volume, in which all the heroes and heroines, save one, were
born in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But I would