DEDICATION. TO THE MOST HIGH AND MIGHTY SOVEREIGN OF SOVEREIGNS,
KING PEOPLE.
May it please Your Majesty—

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It was the custom, previous to the commencement
of Your Majesty's auspicious reign, for every judicious
author to dedicate his work to some munificent potentate,
who, by virtue of the Divine Right of granting
pensions, held, as it were, the purse-strings of
inspiration; or to some neighboring prince, or noble,
whose rank in the State, or whose reputation for
taste, might serve, if not as a guarantee to the merits
of the work, at least, in some measure, to overawe
the vinegarized critics from falling foul of it with
tomahawk and scalping-knife.

I, however, may it please Your Majesty, choose

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rather to go to the fountain-head—the source and
grand reservoir of dignity and power—and scorn to
skulk behind the outworks, when I flatter myself I
may have the good fortune to effect a lodgment in
the very citadel itself, under the immediate protection
of your most sacred Majesty, to whom, of all potentates,
can be justly applied the great maxims: “The
king can do no wrong.”—“The king never dies.”

You alone reign by Divine Right: you alone inherit
the privilege, and exercise the power of judging the
past, directing the present, and presiding over the
future. You alone are the great arbiter of living and
posthumous fame; for being yourself immortal, it is
yours to confer immortality on others. Your empire
is self-governed and self-sustained. You require
neither fleets, armies, nor armed police, to enforce
your decisions, for your fiat is fate. You can set up
kings and knock them down like nine-pins; you can
make and unmake laws at pleasure; you can make
little men great, and great men little: your will,
when you choose to exert it, is despotic throughout
the nations of the earth, for Your Majesty is the only
sovereign that ever existed who could justly boast of
universal empire.

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Not only is your power without limits, but your
judgment infallible in the selection of favorites, and
the bestowal of honors. If you call a pigmy a
giant, a giant he becomes; and if you dub a man a
fool, the wisdom of Solomon cannot save him from the
Hospital of Incurables. The reputation of heroes,
statesmen, sages, and philosophers, is entirely at your
mercy; you keep the keys of the Temple of Fame,
and none can enter without your royal permission.
In short, when Your Majesty issues a decree, it must
be carried into effect, for with you there is nothing
impossible, and all must obey him who is himself all.

It is for these, and other special reasons, which I
forbear to enumerate, lest I should tire Your Majesty's
royal patience, that I have, as it were, turned
my back on the rest of the world, and selected Your
Majesty as mine own especial Mecœnas, knowing full
well you are of all patrons the most munificent and
discriminating. May it please Your Majesty then to
issue your Royal Bull, directing that no critic shall
presume to mangle this my work with a stone
hatchet, or dissect it with a butcher's cleaver, unless
he can give a good reason for it: that it shall be
puffed and trumpeted to the uttermost confines of

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your universal empire, insomuch that it shall go
through as many editions as the Pilgrim's Progress,
or Robinson Crusoe: that all members of Congress,
past, present, and future, shall be furnished with a
copy at the expense of Your Majesty, and what is
more, be obliged to read it—unless their education
has been neglected; that whoever ushers it into the
world shall make a judicious distribution of copies;
and above all, that Your Majesty will order and direct
some munificent Bibliopole to publish it, at the expense
of the author.

Relying thus on the powerful aid of Your Majesty,
I considered it my interest, as well as my duty, to
consult Your Majesty's royal palate in the conception
and development of this my humble offering; and
having been assured by an eminent publisher that
Your Majesty relishes nothing but works of fiction
and picture-books, I hereby offer at the footstool of
your royal clemency a work, which, though it contains
a great many truths, I flatter myself they are so
dextrously disguised that Your Majesty will not be a
whit the wiser for them. If I appear, or affect to appear,
as an adviser or instructor to Your Majesty, it is
not that I have the presumption to suppose that Your

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Majesty requires either advice or instruction, but because
it is next to impossible for an author to
dissemble the conviction that he is wiser than his
readers.

Having, for a long time past, been sedulously occupied
studying Your Majesty's royal tastes, I am not
ignorant of your preference for high-seasoned dishes
of foreign cookery, most especially blood-puddings,
plentifully spiced and sauced with adultery, seduction,
poisoning, stabbing, suicide, and all other sublime excesses
of genius. I am aware also that Your Majesty,
being yourself able to perform impossibilities, believes
nothing impossible. Possessing this clew to Your
Majesty's royal approbation, I solemnly assure you I
have gone as far as I could to secure it, with a safe
conscience. I have laid about me pretty handsomely,
and sprinkled a good number of my pages with blood
enough, I hope, to make a pudding. If I have any
apology to make to Your Majesty, it is for permitting
some of my people to die a natural death, a thing so
unnatural that it has been banished from all works of
fiction aiming at the least semblance to truth.

I am aware, may it please Your Majesty, that it is
one of the established canons of critical and other

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criminal courts, that killing is no murder; and that a
writer of fiction is not amenable to any tribunal, civil,
ecclesiastical, or critical, for any capital crime, except
murdering his own story. But, may it please Your
Majesty, I am troubled with weak nerves, and my
great grandfather was a Quaker. I am, therefore,
naturally averse to bloodshed, and have more than
once nearly fallen into convulsions over the pages of
Monsieur Alexandre Dumas, whom I consider a perfect
Guillotine among authors. In short, may it please
Your Majesty, I abjure poisoning, or smothering with
charcoal, and confess myself deplorably behind the
spirit of this luminous age, which is as much in
advance of all others, as the forewheel of a wagon is
ahead of the hind ones.

Your Majesty will, I trust, pardon the most devoted
of your servants, for thus intruding on your
valuable time. But it is a notoriously well-established
fact that authors are a self-sufficient race, who
think themselves qualified to direct Your Majesty's
opinions. I therefore make no apology for so universal
a failing, and shall limit myself on this head, to
beseeching Your Majesty's forgiveness for introducing
to your royal patronage so many honest, discreet

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women, not one of whom hath the least pretensions to
figure at doctors' commons, the criminal court, or in
modern romance.

As this is a time when empires are overturned, and
potentates exiled by romances and newspapers, I
deem it incumbent on me to conclude this my humble
Dedication, by assuring Your Majesty that I have not
the most remote intention of meddling with those
dangerous edge-tools, politics and polemics, any farther
than seemed necessary to render probable the
conduct of the actors, and the incidents of my story.
I solemnly declare that I have no idea of interfering
with Your Majesty's regal prerogative; that I have
no design against Your Majesty's royal person; that I
am neither High-Church nor Low-Church, Socialist,
Red Republican, Anti-Renter, Agrarian, or Philanthropist,
but a peaceable disciple of the doctrine of
passive obedience and non-resistance in all cases where
Your Majesty's prerogative is concerned.

One word more, may it please Your Patient Majesty.
Not considering myself as writing a historical
fiction, or bound by the strict rules of matter of fact,
I have indulged in one or two trifling anachronisms,
which I refrain from pointing out, in order that Your

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Majesty may have the pleasure of detecting them
yourself.