I can publicly make this assertion, without the slightest apprehension of being contradicted.  That the book was cushioned in this country, I am fully aware, and this is all I shall say upon that part of the subject.  Indeed it was never properly published at all—­never advertised—­never reviewed, and, until now, lay nearly in as much obscurity as if it had been still in manuscript.  A few copies of it got into circulating libraries, but, in point of fact, it was never placed before the public at all.  What-ever be its merits, however, it is now in the hands of a gentleman who will do it justice, if it fails, the fault will not at least be his.

My object in writing the book was to exhibit, in contrast, three of the most powerful passions that can agitate the human heart—­I mean love, ambition, and revenge.  To contrive the successive incidents, by which the respective individuals on whose characters they were to operate should manifest their influence with adequate motives, and without departing from actual life and nature, as we observe them in action about us, was a task which required a very close study of the human mind when placed in peculiar circumstances.  In this case the great struggle was between love and ambition.  By ambition, I do not mean the ambition of the truly great man, who wishes to associate it with truth and virtue, and whose object is, in the first place, to gratify it by elevating his country and his kind; no, but that most hateful species of it which exists in the contrivance and working out of family arrangements and insane projects for the aggrandizement of our offspring, under circumstances where we must know that they cannot be accomplished without wrecking the happiness of those to whom they are proposed.  Such a passion, in its darkest aspect—­and in this I have drawn it—­has nothing more in view than the cruel, selfish and undignified object of acquiring some poor and paltry title or distinction for a son or daughter, without reference either to inclination or will, and too frequently in opposition to both.  It is like introducing a system of penal laws into domestic life, and establishing the tyranny of a moral despot among the affections of the heart.  Sometimes, especially in the case of an only child, this ambition grows to a terrific size, and its miserable victim acts with all the unconscious violence of a monomaniac.

In Sir Thomas Gourlay, the reader will perceive that it became the great and engrossing object of his life, and that its violence was strong in proportion to that want of all moral restraint, which resulted from the creed of an infidel and sceptic.  And I may say here, that it was my object to exhibit occasionally the gloomy agonies and hollow delusions of the latter, as the hard and melancholy system on which he based his cruel and unsparing ambition.  His character was by far the most difficult to manage.  Love has an object; and, in this case, in the person of Lucy Gourlay it had a reasonable and a noble one.