But why should lordlings all our praise ?   Rise, honest man, and sing the Man of Ross.
 
                                        Pope
Having, in the tale of the Heart of Mid-Lothian, succeeded in some degree in an interest in behalf of one of those which belong to a heroine almost by right, I was next to choose a hero upon the same unpromising plan; and as worth of character, goodness of heart, and rectitude of principle, were necessary to one who laid no claim to high birth, romantic sensibility, or any of the usual accomplishments of those who through the pages of this sort of composition, I made free with the name of a person who has left the most magnificent proofs of his and charity that the capital of Scotland has to display.
 
To the Scottish reader little more need be said than that the man to is George Heriot. But for those south of the Tweed, it may be necessary to add, that the person so named was a wealthy citizen of Edinburgh, and the King's goldsmith, who followed James to the English capital, and was so successful in his profession, as to die, in 1624, extremely wealthy for that period. He had no children; and after making a full provision for such relations as might have claims upon him, he left the of his fortune to establish an hospital, in which the sons of Edinburgh freemen are brought up and educated for the station to which their talents may recommend them, and are finally enabled to enter life under respectable . The hospital in which this charity is maintained is a noble quadrangle of the Gothic order, and as to the city as a building, as the manner in which the youths are provided for and educated, renders it useful to the community as an institution. To the honour of those who have the management, (the and of Edinburgh), the funds of the Hospital have increased so much under their care, that it now supports and educates one hundred and thirty youths , many of whom have done honour to their country in different situations.
 
The of such a charity as this may be reasonably supposed to have walked through life with a steady pace, and an observant eye, neglecting no opportunity of assisting those who were not of the experience necessary for their own guidance. In supposing his efforts directed to the benefit of a young nobleman, misguided by the aristocratic of his own time, and the tone of selfish luxury which seems more to ours, as well as the seductions of pleasure which are predominant in all, some amusement, or even some advantage, might, I thought, be from the manner in which I might bring the of this to bear in his pupil's behalf. I am, I own, no great believer in the moral utility to be derived from compositions; yet, if in any case a word spoken in season may be of advantage to a young person, it must surely be when it calls upon him to attend to the voice of principle and self-denial, instead of that of passion. I could not, indeed, hope or expect to represent my and citizen in a point of view so interesting as that of the peasant girl, who nobly sacrificed her family affections to the integrity of her moral character. Still however, something I hoped might be done not altogether unworthy the fame which George Heriot has secured by the benefits he has on his country.
 
It appeared likely, that out of this simple plot I might weave something attractive; because the of James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the , while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical , have been introduced, if the scene had been laid a century earlier. Lady Mary Wortley Montague has said, with equal truth and taste, that the most romantic region of every country is that where the mountains unite themselves with the plains or lowlands. For similiar reasons, it may be in like manner said, that the most period of history is that when the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age are just becoming upon, and contrasted, by the illumination of increased or revived learning, and the instructions of renewed or reformed religion. The strong contrast produced by the of ancient manners to those which are gradually them, affords the lights and shadows necessary to give effect to a fictitious ; and while such a period entitles the author to introduce incidents of a marvellous and improbable character, as arising out of the turbulent independence and ferocity, belonging to old habits of violence, still influencing the manners of a people who had been so lately in a barbarous state; yet, on the other hand, the characters and sentiments of many of the actors may, with the utmost probability, be described with great variety of shading and , which belongs to the newer and more improved period, of which the world has but lately received the light.
 
The reign of James I. of England possessed this advantage in a peculiar degree. Some beams of , although its planet had been for some time set, continued to and the horizon, and although probably no one acted on its Quixotic , men and women still talked the language of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia; and the ceremonial of the tilt-yard was yet exhibited, though it now only flourished as a Place de Carrousel. Here and there a high-spirited of the Bath, witness the too Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was found enough to the he had taken, to imagine himself obliged to compel, by the sword's-point, a fellow-knight or to restore the top-knot of ribbon which he had stolen from a fair damsel;[Footnote: See Lord Herbert of Cherbury's .] but yet, while men were taking each other's lives on such punctilios of honour, the hour was already arrived when Bacon was about to teach the world that they were no longer to reason from authority to fact, but to establish truth by advancing from fact to fact, till they an indisputable authority, not from hypothesis, but from experiment.
 
The state of society in the reign of James I. was also strangely disturbed, and the of a part of the community was perpetually giving rise to acts of blood and violence. The bravo of the Queen's day, of whom Shakspeare has given us so many varieties, as Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, Peto, and the other companions of Falstaff, men who had their humours, or their particular turn of extravaganza, had, since the commencement of the Low Country wars, given way to a race of sworders, who used the rapier and , instead of the far less dangerous sword and buckler; so that a historian says on this subject, “that private quarrels were nourished, but especially between the Scots and English; and in every street maintained; and peculiar titles passed unpunished and unregarded, as the of the Roaring Boys, Bonaventors, Bravadors, Quarterors, and such like, being persons , and of great expense, who, having run themselves into debt, were to run next into , to defend themselves from danger of the law. These received from divers of the nobility; and the citizens, through consuming their estates, it was like that the number [of these desperadoes] would rather increase than diminish; and under these they entered into many desperate enterprizes, and scarce any durst walk in the street after nine at night."[Footnote: history of the First Fourteen Years of King James's Reign. See Somers's , edited by Scott, vol. ii. p.266.]
 
The same authority assures us farther, that “ancient gentlemen, who had left their inheritance whole and well furnished with goods and (having thereupon kept good houses) unto their sons, lived to see part consumed in riot and excess, and the rest in possibility to be lost; the holy state of matrimony made but a May-game, by which divers families had been ; brothel houses much frequented, and even great persons, prostituting their bodies to the intent to satisfy their , consumed their substance in appetites. And of all sorts, such and gentlemen, as either through pride or prodigality—had consumed their substance, repairing to the city, and to the intent to consume their also, lived dissolute lives; many of their ladies and daughters, to the intent to maintain themselves according to their dignity, prostituting their bodies in manner. Ale-houses, dicing-houses, , and places of , beyond manner in most places.”
 
Nor is it only in the pages of a , perhaps a satirical writer, that we find so shocking and disgusting a picture of the coarseness of the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the contrary, in all the comedies of the age, the principal character for gaiety and wit is a young heir, who has totally altered the establishment of the father to whom he has succeeded, and, to use the old , who resembles a fountain, which plays off in idleness and extravagance the wealth which its careful parents painfully had assembled in hidden reservoirs.
 
And yet, while that spirit of general extravagance seemed at work over a whole kingdom, another and very different sort of men were gradually forming the staid and resolved characters, which afterwards displayed themselves during the civil wars, and powerfully regulated and the character of the whole English nation, until, rushing from one extreme to another, they sunk in a gloomy the splendid traces of the reviving fine arts.
 
From the which I have produced, the selfish and disgusting conduct of Lord Dalgarno will not perhaps appear overstrained; nor will the scenes in Whitefriars and places of similar resort seem too highly coloured. This indeed is far from being the case. It was in James I.'s reign that first appeared affecting the better classes in its gross and undisguised depravity. The entertainments and amusements of Elizabeth's time had an air of that decent restraint which became the court of a sovereign; and, in that earlier period, to use the words of Burke, vice lost half its evil by being deprived of all its grossness. In James's reign, on the contrary, the coarsest pleasures were publicly and indulged, since, according to Sir John Harrington, the men wallowed in beastly delights; and even ladies abandoned their and rolled about in . After a ludicrous account of a mask, in which the actors had got drunk, and behaved themselves accordingly, he adds, “I have much at these strange pageantries, and they do bring to my recollection what passed of this sort in our Queen's days, in which I was sometimes an assistant and partaker: but never did I see such lack of good order and sobriety as I have now done. The fright is got out of all our heads, and we are going on hereabout as if the devil was every man should blow up himself by wild riot, excess, and of time and temperance. The great ladies do go well masqued; and indeed, it be the only show of their to their countenance, but alack, they meet with such countenance to uphold their strange doings, that I not at aught that happens."[Footnote: Harrington's Nugae Antique, vol. ii. p. 352. For the gross debauchery of the period, too much encouraged by the example of the , who was, in other respects, neither without talent nor a good-natured , see Winwood's Memorials, Howell's Letters, and other Memorials of the time; but particularly, consult the Private Letters and Correspondence of Steenie, Buckingham, with his reverend Dad and Gossip, King James, which with the grossest as well as the most childish language. The learned Mr. D'Israeli, in an attempt to the character of James, has only succeeded in obtaining for himself the character of a and ingenious advocate, without much advantage to his royal client]
 
Such being the state of the court, coarse sensuality brought along with it its ordinary companion, a degree of undisguised selfishness, destructive alike of philanthropy and good breeding; both of which, in their several spheres, depend upon the regard paid by each individual to the interest as well as the feelings of others. It is in such a time that the heartless and shameless man of wealth and power may, like the supposed Lord Dalgarno, out the shame of his villainies, and affect to triumph in their consequences, so long as they were personally to his own pleasures or profit.
 
Alsatia is elsewhere explained as a name for Whitefriars, which, possessing certain privileges of , became for that reason a nest of those characters who were generally to the law. These privileges were derived from its having been an establishment of the Carmelites, or White Friars, founded says Stow, in his Survey of London, by Sir Patrick Grey, in 1241. Edward I. gave them a plot of ground in Fleet Street, to build their church upon. The then was rebuilt by Courtney, Earl of Devonshire, in the reign of Edward. In the time of the Reformation the place retained its as a sanctuary, and James I. confirmed and added to them by a charter in 1608. Shadwell was the first author who made some literary use of Whitefriars, in his play of the Squire of Alsatia, which turns upon the plot of the Adelphi of Terence.
 
In this old play, two men of fortune, brothers, educate two young men, (sons to the one and nephews to the other,) each under his own separate system of rigour and indulgence. The elder of the subjects of this experiment, who has been very brought up, falls at once into all the of the town, is debauched by the cheats and of Whitefriars, and, in a word, becomes the Squire of Alsatia. The poet gives, as the natural and congenial inhabitants of the place, such characters as the reader will find in the note. [Footnote: “Cheatly, a , who by reason of debts dares not stir out of Whitefriars, but there young heirs of , and helps them to goods and money upon great disadvantages, is bound for them, and shares with them till he them. A , , debauched fellow, very expert in the cant about town.
 
“Shamwell, cousin to the Belfords, who, being ruined by Cheatly, is made a decoy-duck for others, not daring to stir out of Alsatia, where he lives. Is bound with Cheatly for heirs, and lives upon them a dissolute debauched life.
 
“Captain Hackum, a blockheaded of Alsatia, a cowardly, impudent, fellow, a in Flanders, who has run from his colours, and retreated into Whitefriars for a very small debt, where by the Alsatians he is dubb'd a captain, marries one that lets , sells cherry-brandy, and is a bawd.
 
“Scrapeall a hypocritical, repeating, praying, psalm-singing, precise fellow, pretending to great ; a godly , who joins with Cheatly, and supplies young heirs with goods, and money.”—Dramatis Personae to the Squire of Alsatia, SHADWELL'S Works, vol. iv.] The play, as we learn from the to the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, was successful above the author's expectations, “no comedy these many years having filled the theatre so long together. And I had the great honour,” continues Shadwell, “to find so many friends, that the house was never so full since it was built as upon the third day of this play, and vast numbers went away that could not be admitted.” [Footnote: Dedication to the Squire of Alsatia, Shadwell's Works, vol. iv.] From the Squire of Alsatia the author derived some few hints, and learned the footing on which the bullies and thieves of the Sanctuary stood with their neighbours, the young students of the Temple, of which some intimation is given in the dramatic piece.
 
Such are the materials to which the author stands indebted for the composition of the Fortunes of Nigel, a novel, which may be perhaps one of those that are more amusing on a second , than when read a first time for the sake of the story, the incidents of which are few and meagre.
 
The Introductory Epistle is written, in Lucio's phrase, “according to the trick,” and would never have appeared had the writer making his of the work. As it is the privilege of a masque or to speak in a voice and assumed character, the author attempted, while in disguise, some liberties of the same sort; and while he continues to plead upon the various excuses which the introduction contains, the present acknowledgment must serve as an apology for a species of “hoity toity, whisky frisky” pertness of manner, which, in his character, the author should have considered as a departure from the rules of civility and good taste.
 
ABBOTSFORD.
 
1st July, 1831.