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An Unfinished Historical Romance
Dedication
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Revised by your helpful hand, and corrected by your accuratescholarship, to whom may these pages be so fitly inscribed as to thatone of their author's earliest and most honoured friends,[1] whosegenerous assistance has enabled me to place them before the public intheir present form?
It is fully fifteen, if not twenty, years since my father commencedthe composition of an historical romance on the subject of Pausanias,the Spartan Regent. Circumstances, which need not here be recorded,compelled him to lay aside the work thus begun. But the subjectcontinued to haunt his imagination and occupy his thoughts. He detectedin it singular opportunities for effective exercise of the gifts mostpeculiar to his genius; and repeatedly, in the intervals of otherliterary labour, he returned to the task which, though again and againinterrupted, was never abandoned. To that rare combination of theimaginative and practical faculties which characterized my father'sintellect, and received from his life such varied illustration, thestory of Pausanias, indeed, briefly as it is told by Thucydides andPlutarch, addressed itself with singular force. The vast conspiracy ofthe Spartan Regent, had it been successful, would have changed thewhole course of Grecian history. To any student of political phenomena,but more especially to one who, during the greater part of his life,had been personally engaged in active politics, the story of such aconspiracy could not fail to be attractive. To the student of humannature the character of Pausanias himself offers sources of thedeepest interest; and, in the strange career and tragic fate of thegreat conspirator, an imagination fascinated by the supernatural musthave recognized remarkable elements of awe and terror. A few monthsprevious to his death, I asked my father whether he had abandoned allintention of finishing his romance of "Pausanias." He replied, "On thecontrary, I am finishing it now," and entered, with great animation,into a discussion of the subject and its capabilities. This reply to myinquiry surprised and impressed me: for, as you are aware, my father wasthen engaged in the simultaneous composition of two other and verydifferent works, "Kenelm Chillingly" and the "Parisians." It was thelast time he ever spoke to me about Pausanias; but from what he thensaid of it I derived an impression that the book was all but completed,and needing only a few finishing touches to be ready for publication atno distant date.
This impression was confirmed, subsequent to my father's death, by aletter of instructions about his posthumous papers which accompaniedhis will. In that letter, dated 1856, special allusion is made toPausanias as a work already far advanced towards its conclusion.
You, to whom, in your kind and careful revision of it, this unfinishedwork has suggested many questions which, alas, I cannot answer, asto the probable conduct and fate of its fictitious characters, willreadily understan