secret of the author's original design, usually views the work through a
different medium; and is perhaps in this the wiser critic of the two:
for the book that wanders the most from the idea which originated it may
often be better than that which is rigidly limited to the unfolding and
/denouement/ of a single conception. If we accept this solution, we may
be enabled to understand why an author not unfrequently makes favourites
of some of his productions most condemned by the public. For my own
part, I remember that "Devereux" pleased me better than "Pelham" or "The
Disowned," because the execution more exactly corresponded with the
design. It expressed with tolerable fidelity what I meant it to
express. That was a happy age, my dear Auldjo, when, on finishing a
work, we could feel contented with our labour, and fancy we had done our
best! Now, alas I I have learned enough of the wonders of the Art to
recognize all the deficiencies of the Disciple; and to know that no
author worth the reading can ever in one single work do half of which he
is capable.

What man ever wrote anything really good who did not feel that he had
the ability to write something better? Writing, after all, is a cold
and a coarse interpreter of thought. How much of the imagination, how
much of the intellect, evaporates and is lost while we seek to embody it
in words! Man made language and God the genius. Nothing short of an
eternity could enable men who imagine, think, and feel, to express all
they have imagined, thought, and felt. Immortality, the spiritual
desire, is the intellectual /necessity/.

In "Devereux" I wished to portray a man flourishing in the last century
with the train of mind and sentiment peculiar to the present; describing
a life, and not its dramatic epitome, the historical characters
introduced are not closely woven with the main plot, like those in the