ADVERTISEMENT.
A few words by way of introduction, and `Guy Rivers'
must make his farther progress alone. The author can
have little to say, in this place, which would materially
avail in securing for him a favourable reception from
the various circle into which he will most probably go.
A single sentence, from the German of Schiller, which
the reader will find the subject of frequent illustration
in the narrative, as he proceeds, will answer all the purposes
of a preface. “Grant us,” said that sagacious
moralist, in the course of a story not more remarkable
for its simplicity than its strength—“grant us only a
Linnæus for the classification of the impulses and passions
of man, as in the other kingdoms of the natural
world, and many, whose career of crime is now confined
within the limits of a little town, and hedged in by municipal
regulation, we should be surprised to find connected,
in one and the same order, with the monster
Borgia.” The author of `Guy Rivers' has had this text
in his eye in much of the narrative that follows. He
has endeavoured, however feebly, to extend the glance
somewhat into causes, which, in most cases of moral
analysis, is quite too much confined to effects. He will
be understood readily, therefore, when he offers the story,
not merely to those who read, but to those who think—
to those who—unrestrained by the moral cant, which,
permitting the surgeon to probe the wound of the human
body, is unwilling to grant the physician of the human
mind a like privilege—penetrating the superficies and
externals of man and society, are studious in tracing out
the origin of those thousand moral obliquities in our
fellows, upon which, though we always moralize, we
cannot often be said to meditate.
