LONDON: HENRY COLBURN AND RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1832.

ADVERTISEMENT.

“What’s in a name?” is a question to which, perhaps, a bookseller would be apt to reply--“More than meets the eye.” With some suspicion of this kind, I have hesitated much what Title to prefix to the following pages.

I might, it is true, have been satisfied with the safe expedient of any two or three mellifluous, though unmeaning syllables, in the shape of a proper name; but I was anxious, if possible, rather to explain the character than to record the family appellation of my hero--if hero that person must be called whose failings and whose errors occupy most of these pages.

If I had been writing in French, “L’Homme Difficile” would most nearly have defined the character I meant to pourtray; but there is no synonymous phrase in English. “The Fastidious Man” did not quite please me. I am myself fastidious as to the use of the term, “the Man,” in a title explanatory of character. “Fastidiousness” is not euphonious, still less “Fastidiosity,” which Johnson passes current.

Under these difficulties I have left my hero to speak for himself, without introduction; and taking what would, perhaps, at first have been the more gallant course, I have attempted to draw the attention of the reader to the diversity of female character arising, in great part, from difference of situation, under the form, and with the title, of “The Contrast.”

One word more, kind Reader, in the shape of an humble petition for that general indulgence which no one can feel more than myself how much I require.

THE CONTRAST.