THE NEW YORK ASTOR, LENOX AND G. BROWN-GLODE COLLECTION. BY LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO and CO., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court, for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. PHILADELPHIA: C. SHERMAN, PRINTER. PREFACE. WHEN the master of the feast offers some fresh viand to his guests, already surfeited with every variety of fish, flesh, and fowl, it becomes necessary for him to embellish the dish with some new appliances of sauce or seasoning, to render it palatable to already overladen organs of gastronomy. So, in this age of literary surfeit, when a new candidate for the honours of authorship challenges public attention and approval, he will find it essential to interlard his book with at least the attractions of novelty, piquancy, and originality, if he would have his printed sheets escape the hands of trunkmakers and venders of waste paper. In compliance with this requisition, the author begs leave to claim for his book-his maiden book, which has been hastily compiled in the intervals of laborious professional occupation-that its scenes, characters, and incidents, while they have been copied from nature and from life, will be new to the reading public, and may be justly accredited with, at least, the qualities of novelty and originality. The history of that portion of our national domain known as "the West" presents two distinct phases, appropriate to the exercise of the pen of Romance: the first based upon the arduous and protracted conflict between the native savage and the Anglo-Saxon invader; the second, upon the discordant elements of civilized society in a primitive and unsettled condition. To no one of the Western States is this remark more applicable than to Kentucky. Here the Indian, driven, after many a hardfought field, from his favourite hunting-grounds, was succeeded by a rude and unlettered population, interspersed with organized bands of desperadoes, scarcely less savage than the red men they had displaced. It is in the peculiarities of this secondary condition of society, as developed within a portion, at least, of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, that the author has found the materials of the following work. Few works claiming the title of romances (all which are professedly founded in a great measure upon fact), the author confidently believes, have ever comprised so many real characters, so many actual incidents, as the following. Throughout the particular localities of the story, hundreds of persons may be found who will detect, in the career of the hero, a transcript of the life and adventures of one Edward Alonzo Pennington; and although the author, in the exercise of one of the privileges of the craft, has brought many of the minor characters and incidents of the book into a new juxtaposition, yet many of these will also be recognised, with equal facility, as real and true. The reader should be informed in advance that the book before him is interspersed with episodes not immediately 1 connected with the mere narrative of events. Following the bent of his temporary inclination, the author has taken the liberty of indulging occasionally in excursive rambles through themes which skirt the roadside of the narrative. He claims indulgence for sentiments and opinions which may, at the first blush, seem to conflict with the accepted dogmas of society, but which, he trusts, will all bear the scrutiny of reason and common sense. Bearing in mind, however, that many persons read romances merely for "the story," he has requested the printer to adopt, in sundry places, the expedient of setting the types in solid column, without the leads elsewhere used, to indicate the passages which may be "skipped" by any impatient reader, without the loss of any portion of the narrative. In prefatory conclusion—although his book contains a record of many of the vices and crimes incident to a primitive Western society, the author claims for it a perfect immunity from many of the objectionable features which characterize a large number of modern works of romance. He believes and trusts that there is no page or sentence in the work which may not be read, not only without a blush, but with the moral approbation of the most sensitive mind: in the full faith of which the author, imagining himself, for the moment, occupying the forensic rostrum, submits his first book to the judgment of that populous and highly respectable court, the reading public, and awaits their verdict with entire equanimity and resignation. September, 1850. THE AUTHOR. |