In accomplishing this task, I inevitably incur the objections which
the task itself raises up,--objections to the labour it has cost; to
the information which the labour was undertaken in order to bestow;
objections to passages which seem to interrupt the narrative, but
which in reality prepare for the incidents it embraces, or explain the
position of the persons whose characters it illustrates,--whose fate
it involves; objections to the reference to authorities, where a fact
might be disputed, or mistaken for fiction; objections to the use of
Saxon words, for which no accurate synonyms could be exchanged;
objections, in short, to the colouring, conduct, and composition of
the whole work; objections to all that separate it from the common
crowd of Romances, and stamp on it, for good or for bad, a character
peculiarly its own. Objections of this kind I cannot remove, though I
have carefully weighed them all. And with regard to the objection
most important to story-teller and novel reader--viz., the dryness of
some of the earlier portions, though I have thrice gone over those
passages, with the stern determination to inflict summary justice upon
every unnecessary line, I must own to my regret that I have found but
little which it was possible to omit without rendering the after
narrative obscure, and without injuring whatever of more stirring
interest the story, as it opens, may afford to the general reader of
Romance.

As to the Saxon words used, an explanation of all those that can be
presumed unintelligible to a person of ordinary education, is given
either in the text or a foot-note. Such archaisms are much less
numerous than certain critics would fain represent them to be: and
they have rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have
been employed without a glaring anachronism, or a tedious periphrase.
Would it indeed be possible, for instance, to convey a notion of the