Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, sofar as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any viewto further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services whichyou have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought togetherso widely scattered a collection—a difficulty which in my own hands bytoo painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to beabsolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participatorin the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitationor the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claimthat I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solelyand merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers,I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who havetaken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good orbad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individualhouse, the Messrs. TICKNOR & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent ofany power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by lawor custom in America.
I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriesttrifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express mysense of the liberality manifested throughout this transaction by yourhonorable house.
Ever believe me, my dear sir,
Your faithful and obliged,
Many of the papers in my collected works were originally written underone set of disadvantages, and are now revised under another. They werewritten generally under great pressure as to time, in order to catchthe critical periods of monthly journals; written oftentimes at adistance from the press (so as to have no opportunity for correction);and always written at a distance from libraries, so that very manystatements, references, and citations, were made on the authority of myunassisted memory. Under such circumstances were most of the paperscomposed; and they are now reissued in a corrected form, sometimes evenpartially recast, under the distraction of a nervous misery whichembarrasses my efforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible bywords. Such, indeed, is the distress produced by this malady, that, ifthe present act of republication had in any respect worn the characterof an experiment, I should have shrunk from it in despondency. But theexperiment, so far as there was any, had been already tried for mevicariously amongst the Americans; a people so nearly repeating our ownin style of intellect, and in the composition of their reading class,that a success amongst them counts for a success amongst ourselves. Forsome few of the separate papers in these volumes I make pretensions ofa higher cast. These pretensions I will explain hereafter. All the restI resign to the reader's unbiased judgment, adding here, with respectto four of them, a few prefatory words—not of propitiation ordeprecation, but simply in explanation as to points that wouldotherwise be open to misconstruction.
1. The paper on "Murder