of Europe.

The two qualities in fiction which hold the highest rank in your
estimation are: Character and Humour. Incident and dramatic situation
only occupy the second place in your favour. A novel that tells no
story, or that blunders perpetually in trying to tell a story--a novel
so entirely devoid of all sense of the dramatic side of human life,
that not even a theatrical thief can find anything in it to steal--will
nevertheless be a work that wins (and keeps) your admiration, if it has
Humour which dwells on your memory, and characters which enlarge the
circle of your friends.

I have myself always tried to combine the different merits of a good
novel, in one and the same work; and I have never succeeded in keeping
an equal balance. In the present story you will find the scales
inclining, on the whole, in favour of character and Humour. This has
not happened accidentally.

Advancing years, and health that stands sadly in need of improvement,
warn me--if I am to vary my way of work--that I may have little time to
lose. Without waiting for future opportunities, I have kept your
standard of merit more constantly before my mind, in writing this book,
than on some former occasions.

Still persisting in telling you a story--still refusing to get up in
the pulpit and preach, or to invade the platform and lecture, or to
take you by the buttonhole in confidence and make fun of my Art--it has
been my chief effort to draw the characters with a vigour and breadth
of treatment, derived from the nearest and truest view that I could get
of the one model, Nature. Whether I shall at once succeed in adding to