judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered
faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true
course and true causes of the great political events, and the
essential attributes of the principal agents. Solely in that inward
life which, not only as apart from the more public and historical, but
which, as almost wholly unknown, becomes the fair domain of the poet,
did I claim the legitimate privileges of fiction, and even here I
employed the agency of the passions only so far as they served to
illustrate what I believed to be the genuine natures of the beings who
had actually lived, and to restore the warmth of the human heart to
the images recalled from the grave.

Thus, even had I the gifts of my most illustrious predecessors, I
should be precluded the use of many of the more brilliant. I shut
myself out from the wider scope permitted to their fancy, and denied
myself the license to choose or select materials, alter dates, vary
causes and effects according to the convenience of that more imperial
fiction which invents the Probable where it discards the Real. The
mode I have adopted has perhaps only this merit, that it is my own--
mine by discovery and mine by labour. And if I can raise not the
spirits that obeyed the great master of romance, nor gain the key to
the fairyland that opened to his spell,--at least I have not rifled
the tomb of the wizard to steal my art from the book that lies clasped
on his breast.

In treating of an age with which the general reader is so unfamiliar
as that preceding the Norman Conquest, it is impossible to avoid
(especially in the earlier portions of my tale) those explanations of
the very character of the time which would have been unnecessary if I
had only sought in History the picturesque accompaniments to Romance.