Peter the Great, Lord Bolingbroke, and others less eminent, but still of
mark in their own day, if growing obscure to ours, are introduced not
for the purposes and agencies of fiction, but as an autobiographer's
natural illustrations of the men and manners of his time.

And here be it pardoned if I add that so minute an attention has been
paid to accuracy that even in petty details, and in relation to
historical characters but slightly known to the ordinary reader, a
critic deeply acquainted with the memoirs of the age will allow that the
novelist is always merged in the narrator.

Unless the Author has failed more in his design than, on revising the
work of his early youth with the comparatively impartial eye of maturer
judgment, he is disposed to concede, Morton Devereux will also be found
with that marked individuality of character which distinguishes the man
who has lived and laboured from the hero of romance. He admits into his
life but few passions; those are tenacious and intense: conscious that
none who are around him will sympathize with his deeper feelings, he
veils them under the sneer of an irony which is often affected and never
mirthful. Wherever we find him, after surviving the brief episode of
love, we feel--though he does not tell us so--that he is alone in the
world. He is represented as a keen observer and a successful actor in
the busy theatre of mankind, precisely in proportion as no cloud from
the heart obscures the cold clearness of the mind. In the scenes of
pleasure there is no joy in his smile; in the contests of ambition there
is no quicker beat of the pulse. Attaining in the prime of manhood such
position and honour as would first content and then sate a man of this
mould, he has nothing left but to discover the vanities of this world
and to ponder on the hopes of the next; and, his last passion dying out
in the retribution that falls on his foe, he finally sits down in